News You Can Bruise for 2009 January 26 (entry 0)

(3) Mon Jan 26 2009 20:32 External Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Since I built the PVR about six months ago I've been using more storage space. Not only is there a lot of recorded TV, but I embarked on a recently-completed quest to rip all my DVDs[0], currently amounting to about a terabyte, and after a narrowly averted disaster I decided to get serious about keeping backups. This meant buying huge hard drives, which is always fun, but it also meant buying a bunch of "enclosures": ugly metal shells with SATA controllers (?) and USB interfaces. One enclosure per drive, costing a significant fraction of the cost of the drive.

But! Recently I discovered the BlacX non-enclosure, which accepts hard drives like huge Atari 2600 cartridges into its top-loading maw. To me it's the idea of the external hard drive taken to its logical conclusion: there's a hard drive, and it's not inside anything. Recommended.

[0] I had this naive idea that I would encode all the tracks on all my DVDs to AVI files to save space, but it turns out that takes forever, so it was more cost-effective to just shell out for a bigger drive and rip the whole DVDs. Not that any part of this project could be considered "cost-effective".

Comments:

Posted by Brendan at Mon Jan 26 2009 20:46

Delighted gasp!

Posted by Nathaniel at Tue Jan 27 2009 17:25

That is ridicu^WAWESOME.

The next step is to build a hard-drive loading robot, like tape libraries have.

More seriously, I wonder if in tossing around unprotected hard drives you'll start losing them to static, like the Very Serious Warning Labels always, well, warn.

I've always just used white box computers as my storage enclosures. A $200 box can hold 4 hard drives (maybe more if you need it), and you get RAID/Ethernet/SATA instead of nothing/USB/ick. Requires an ethernet-wired closet to stick it in, though.

Posted by Evan at Tue Jan 27 2009 22:44

I always thought those anti-static wrist straps were a ruse.