I need space....

Hard disk space that is.

I have a total of 2 GB of Network-attached storage, consisting of a Linksys NAS200 with two 500 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 SATA drives, and a 1 TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk connected to the NAS200 via USB.

It isn't enough.

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Linksys NAS200.

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Seagate FreeAgent Desk.

I bought the NAS200 with its two drives about a year and a half ago. The FreeAgent is only about four months old. Between the two of them I only have about 200 GB of space free, and at the rate I'm downloading stuff, I'd probably fill my drives to capacity in a few weeks' time.

Two terabytes of movies, TV series, animes, documentaries, comic books, e-books, MP3s, and what not.

When I first started with computers in the 80s, (yes I'm old, I know) I thought the 143 KB capacity of a single-sided 5.25" floppy on my Apple II Plus was a godsend, especially when compared to the meager capacity and inconvenience of storing data on cassette tapes, which were popular at the time. Today in 2010, I have 7 million times the capacity of those 143 KB discs, and it still isn't enough.

Nowadays, it seems the best way to store your data is on a hard drive. I've been backing up and storing programs and data on various media over the past three decades, but eventually you end up with a pile of storage media in various formats and no drive to read them.

PhotobucketStored in my closets, cabinets and shelves are hundreds of neatly filed 160 KB 5.25" discs from my long dead Apple II, 360 KB 5.25" floppies from my old PC, 1.2 MB HD 5.25" floppies for an AT high density drive, 720 KB and 1.44 MB 3.5" microfloppies, dozens of 100 MB Zip Disks, and a few 1 GB Jaz Disks, most of which are chock full of data, but for all intents and purposes, useless. In a few years CD-ROMs, CD-Rs and CD-RWs will be obsolete as well, and I also have hundreds of them. A few more years after that, the vast collection of DVDs I have will also be obsolete. The moral of the story is that any storage medium, no matter how high-tech it may seem when you first use them, is destined to be obsolete, so don't bother accumulating much of them.

At present, I rely mostly on network attached drives, USB drives, and flash drives, aside from the internal drives of my various PCs. No doubt after a while these will be obsolete as well. I haven't gotten around to getting any of those new-fangled solid-state drives (SSDs), I still can't afford them.

For now I guess, it's either I cut down on the downloads, or get more storage space.

Okay. I'll get more storage space. :-)

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