Years ago, shortly before the turn of the century, I had a pretty good backup solution. I had a 20 Gigabyte tape drive that I used to back up all of my storage.
That was a decade ago. Somewhere along the line, the combined increases in total storage I had to back up plus the slowness/cost/general hassle of maintaining tapes mean that my backup strategy broke down. I tried various things in the interim, including network attached storage in 2006, and the Time Capsule for backing up my Macintoshes. The Time Capsule works great, but even with a terabyte of disk storage I am rapidly running out of room- and it does nothing to back up my Windows or Linux machines.
I needed something expandable, multi-platform, fast, and inexpensive. Well, three out of four isn’t bad, I guess…
Everyone is talking about SSDs replacing hard drives, if not today than Real Soon Now. On the surface, solid state drives have a lot going for them: no moving parts, potentially very dense storage, and the possibility for low power consumption. The main things stopping me, at least, from seriously considering an SSD in my machines until recently were price and capacity. The cheapest SSDs cost something like $600 for 64 gigabytes: a normal hard drive might costs $200 for 500 gigabytes of storage, making SSDs easily ten times the price of mechanical hard drives on a per gigabyte basis.
But solid state drives obviously have an advantage in terms of reliability and power consumption, right? So all I have to do is wait for the inevitable drop in price/increase in capacity that Moore’s law suggests and I’ll be set. Maybe… or maybe not.
I’m pretty happy with my Macbook Pro. But on the day I bought it, I started planning upgrades: I’m a geek, after all.
The first thing on my list- upgrade from the default 2 GB to 4 GB of RAM. That was done about a week after I bought the machine. Second on my list: a larger and faster hard drive. 120 GB of storage on a 5400 RPM drive is nice, but 240 GB at 7200 RPM… that would be just the ticket.
