My laptop hard drive was obviously on its death bed this weekend, so I had to order a replacement which showed up today - that’s the foil pouch on the top. The weekend before that I finally got fed up with the increasingly loud whining coming from my desktop PC and replaced its hard drive as well. As an incredibly absurd result of this, there are currently eleven hard drives in my house right now in varying degrees of health. Three of them are in computers I use regularly, one is in a Tivo, two are in iPods (one used 4th gen, one unused 1st gen with barely useable battery), one is from Dorritta’s old PC and still has some of her data on it (left drive above), two are old Western Digital hard drives that got old and intolerably whiny but still work (one of them being the drive in the middle), one is in a enclosure and used for backups (the black box), the last is the dying laptop drive I need to replace. Combined the sum total capacity of these eleven drives is nearly 700 gigs. This doesn’t include the busted hard drive I sent to Dell for recycling this week (another Western Digital. Why did I persist in buying WD drives? I don’t know, but I’ve switched to Seagate Barracudas for their warranties), the couple of iffy drives I gave to Manh a couple of months ago (I think both were in the Tivo at some point), and various other hard drives that might still be mouldering in a closet in Vancouver somewhere. I think I’ve owned something like twenty hard drives over my life, quite possibly adding up to a terabyte of storage. Surely this must be enough to store some sizable portion of the Library of Congress. There is no way I’ve created more than a few gigabytes of anything meaningful in my entire lifetime, and no this does not count my ripped CD collection. Something is quite wrong with this picture. Shouldn’t affordable holographic perpendicular indestructible instant and other buzzword compliant storage have been invented by now? We’re still at the mercy of spinning plates with bits of metal floating a couple of hundred molecules above, which just sounds so.. primitive.

Speaking of Dorritta’s PC: Rosalind and I replaced it with a Mac mini for her birthday after I got fed up having to deal with Windows crap - the last straw being two trips to Vancouver two weeks apart where on the first trip I fixed her computer, then on the second trip Mom’s computer, and then immediately after I returned the second time I got a phone call saying Dorritta’s computer had just died after she accidentally booted off some wrong floppy. Sister’s initial impression? “Ooo, it’s like a cute bento box!”, then she tried to pry off the lid in the thoughts it was a laptop of some sort. *shakes head* literature students. My initial impression? As I suspected earlier, they’re fantastic machines for relatives - quiet, powerful enough (heck, it’s beefier than my current Mac laptop), comes with a fairly decent software package (although I did end up giving her my little used copy of Office X), and she hasn’t broken it yet in two weeks. Quite promising. Just keep in mind they have no keyboard and mouse port and only have two USB ports. And Apple keyboards (with USB port replicators) are seemingly impossible to find in brick and mortar stores. Which means if you’re plugging in an old keyboard and mouse, you’re probably going to have to get a USB hub to plug in a printer.