New Tech Splurges

Bought a couple items recently that are pretty sweet additions to the home computer:

1. A Drobo storage device. It's basically a box with bays for up to four SATA hard drives that looks to the computer like an ordinary USB drive. Each bay has a status light, telling you, in effect, "everything's fine" or "replace me" or "getting full, swap in a bigger drive". All of those are actions you can do on the fly, without powering down or telling the Drobo in advance. The Drobo ensures redundancy of data on the drives. It's such a charming device that I almost want to replace drives to see it in action, but really, it's a place to store data and not worry about it. No more worrying that I should do a backup; all i really need to concern myself with is offsite backups in case the whole device is destroyed or lost at once.

Given that we dropped major $$$ to retrieve data from a dead drive a year ago, this is a great thing to have. It's like a RAID drive or a NetApp for the masses, minus the administrative headaches.

2. Ostensibly I bought a 30 inch monitor for Diane so she could work on her school stuff and have many more documents open and visible at the same time. It also sort of vaguely (cough, cough) occurred to me that it might be nice for gaming, especially with so many great games out (BioShock, Team Fortress 2, Half Life Episode 2). In fact, it's beautiful and it works great for Diane, but it's so huge that I fear I can't see everything that's happening in a FPS game, much like sitting in the front row of a movie theatre. Will I have to switch game genres? Or sit back further from the computer (shudder)?

Now of course, it's turning out that running Diane's documents and a game is proving a strain for the computer, so I'm soon to install 2 Gig of RAM in the machine, which I am hoping will make it less painful to switch from citing academic references to bludgeoning aliens.