Disk redundancy is something that I’ve been wanting in my home server for quite a while now, and since I now make (relatively) huge paychecks for working somewhere else than McDonalds, I thought that with the traditional HDD’s prices plumetting because of the increasinly competitive SSD segment taking over, it might be a good time to invest in some RAID1 for protection. I took a deep breath, swiped my debit care, and 200 dollars later I was the pround owner of two Seagate 7200.11 500 gig drives. 

I thought that the ICH9r southbridge on my server motherboard would make things really easy: get into the BIOS, edit a few things, press next and ok a couple of times, and maybe install a driver or two with yum to get the damned thing working. But, it turns out that RAID controllers built into motherboards kinda sucks, and that compared to a real dedicated RAID controllers, they offer no advantage versus software RAID, also called softraid by some. After some further reading, I discovered that the only real perk to chipset raid is the ability to install an OS on a RAID array without being needy of a dedicated controller. Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same thing as software RAID: since there is no dedicated RAID chip controlling where the data flows, the CPU still have to take care of all the operations concerning storage, so there are few to very little gains in terms of performance. Being to poor to afford a dedicated controller that cost in the 200$ range, I decided to go the softraid way instead. 

What I thought would be a long and tiresome process turned out to be super easy. Linux being super awesome, it has supported software RAID for quite a while, so setting up an array with a recent distro is so easy anybody with minimal skill at the command line can created their own.

First, you plug in your disks (duh), then install the actual software that creates and manages your arrays, called “mdadm”. If you’re under a Red Hat based distro or if you used yum for your software managing needs, just hit up the following at the command line.

yum install mkinitrd mdadm

After that, load a couple of modules:

modprobe raid1
modprobe linear
modprobe multipath

Note that in the previous example, I only loaded a few RAID types, because I was only planning on using RAID 1 anyways. Once that’s done, format  and partition all of your new raid disks with fdisk, as explained in this tutorial. You’ll want to use fd as partition type, which corresponds to Linux RAID autodetect. Once that is done, all you need is two commands to create your new array. 

mdadm –create /dev/md0 –level=1 –raid-disks=2 /dev/sdd /dev/sde
mdadm –examine –scan > /etc/mdadm.conf

The first command will create you array, and from then on you will have a virtual disk called md0 in your /dev/ directory, which can then be mounted wherever you wish. The second command echo’s your RAID configuration in a config file, so that your RAID array is initiated on boot. The devices list above are just the examples I used, use whatever values fit your situation. From then on, the disks will start a bit per bit sync, which according to the drive capacity and how powerful your machine is will take a while. You can monitor your array using the command “cat /proc/mdadm”. Once the sync is done, you can go ahead and do all the regular stuff you will do with a drive, like create files system on it, mount it, add it to fstab for automatic mounting, and there you go, a fully redundant array. You may have to create a filesystem on your created array at some point, which if you followed my examples and common device mounting practices will be mounted at /mnt/md0. Just google up the mkfs command, and create an ext3 filesystem on your device. 

So far, I have only run into one problem, and that was self-induced. After forgetting to save the raid array’s configuration in a file before rebooting, I attempted to recreate a similar array using /dev/sdd notation instead of /dev/sdd1. I thought I have rewritten all my drives while they were syncing, but turns out the only thing I messed up are the partition tables, and after rewriting the tables in fdisk and properly reconstructing my array, I had my data back. Big thanks to Google and this blog entry which helped me get my data back!

Now that I’m running disk redundancy, I sleep better at night thinking that my 4 year’s worth of torrenting is safe. Or not.

Here is a little something I wrote for English class. I personally think that this article only recapitulates what everybody knows about open source, but hey, why not share it with the internetz? Enjoy

From the very start of the emergence of computing, hundreds, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of companies have been trying to get their share of their money to be made in the various segments of computing. The hardware sector, despite it’s explosive growth, stayed pretty simple: the giants of the industry have been fighting for market share ever since it all started, and it will continue that way. The software sector on the other hand, has been relatively the same for a very long while. From the very start of popular computing where people where buying Commodores and dot-matrix printers to type their own documents to just a couple of years ago, people have thought there was only two ways of obtaining the software that they needed: either buying it, or obtaining it illegally, through download or sharing. People are generally unaware that for all that time, an alternative has been available: open source software.

Those who know open source generally can’t live without it. No more shelling big bucks for basic functionality apps like word processing suites, there now is an open source equivalent or replacement to pretty much any commercial software. Some of the most popular software includes OpenOffice, the GIMP, and all the flavors of Linux, but this is just the tip of the iceberg, as sites like Sourceforge are crawling with thousands and thousands of projects.

The concept behind open source is simple. Put your time into the writing of a program, ask others to cooperate, then distribute the compiled software as well as the source code (actual programming code) to the world, for free. Open Source Software (AKA OSS) must not be mixed up with freeware: although all OSS is technically freeware (since it’s free), some freeware has closed source code, which makes it a whole other thing. The concept is difficult to grasp at first: why would a developer write code for free when he can do it for well over 30$ an hour? Why contribute to something and ask nothing in return? While most projects accept donations, they are clearly not making any money out of it, so how can giving away stuff be a viable alternative to today’s software sale’s system based on selling compiled code as intellectual properties? This is what this essay will explore.

First of all, what makes software so popular? Obviously, first of all, it’s free. And because it’s free, it has tons of advantages attached to it, advantages that are all interlinked with one another. User-base is a very big upside: because people are free to download an app whenever they want, obviously more people are going to use the said app, hence more users are prone to liking the piece of software. From then starts word of mouth advertising, in addition to all the other kinds of user-generate publicity that OSS projects usually get. Think about the “Optimized for Firefox”, or “Get Firefox” badges you’re probably seen around the web; commercial software just doesn’t get that kind of attention, to the rare exception of some hyped, niche products like Apple’s OSX and the hardware it comes with. How often have you seen a “Get Internet Explorer” badge on the bottom of web pages? Never, and chances are you won’t live long enough to see it once either. The hype over this piece of software snowballs into something enormous (again Firefox is a prime example), and as more and more people use the piece of software, amateur or professional developers join the bandwagon, and here is another advantage: people who like your project will want to collaborate. donations, contribution to the source code, plugins, and most importantly cross-platform versions (Pidgin can run on more OS that you can name), they all become free additions to your product, which makes it even more appealing for an even larger group of people. Wash rinse, repeat, and you have yourself a project that has the potential of lasting forever.

Yes, sure, some commercial software, like Adobe Photoshop, has an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows for third party tools to be implemented, but the problem with those is that the core of the program can not be modified by the general public, so you are at the mercy of the developer for updates, security patches, and if you don’t like how the newer Photoshop looks, you can’t just ask Adobe for the source code and branch off your own project to have it your way, something that has been seen many times in OSS projects, Torrentflux/TF-B4RT and Pidgin/Carrier to names those that I am aware of. Bottom line is, with open source, you’re in control. If you don’t like what you download, you can go ahead and learn programming and make your own piece of software.
 
Another big advantage that open source has is that very often, it’s a standard setter. Millions and millions of protocols and technologies that power the web and the apps that you use on an everyday basis are powered by open source projects: SQL (Simplified Query Language, which powers databases) is an open norm, perhaps over 90% of websites use it, and all of it’s variants are freely available. The server software that drives it, MySQL, PostGre, the web scripting that call to it, PHP, Perl, the server software that displays it, HTTPD, Tomcat, and even in some cases the website engines that run all those things together to show you the content, Wordpress, PHPBB, they all are free, open source projects. While there are some commercial alternatives to the aforementioned, they don’t fare very well, because again, a team of 50 full time coders will never, ever be able to match what thousands of collaborators can do in just a couple of hours. Had these open norms had been managed by private firms and corporations, all hell would have broken loose. Imagine the BluRay/HD-DVD type format war, but over everything: systems would be isolated from one another, confined to their own proprietary software, able to share information only with it’s similarly configured peers. Anybody who would want to break this confinement would have to pay to get to open up the specifications, possibly creating a rich cartel of software developers, constricting the growth of the entire software sector. Nobody wants that.

So you get the idea, open source is great. But how can it be profitable for a real world business? First, consider this fact: the home segment is a real joke to most software companies; businesses is where the real big bucks are at. So much, that many say that Microsoft could stop selling it’s OS to residential customers and still be one of the richest companies on this planet. Another example, Awil’s Avast Antivirus software is given for free to residential users to popularize the products, while enterprise licenses milk the cash cow. Take Red Hat’s example: they’ve been MAJOR contributors to the linux kernel in addition to fathering two immensely popular linux distributions: Red Hat Linux which is now defunct, and Fedora Core, later dubbed just Fedora, which is going on strong currently at it’s 9th edition. Both products are freely available, the secret to RH’s amazing revenus being their entreprise version linux, originally named Red Hat Entreprise. By selling support and special server-centric additions to their operating system such as virtualization tools, the company has pocketed 700 million dollars in 2007, and continues to grow.

Support is where it’s at, because many companies are willing to take a risk when it comes to buying software. Should I hired a skilled worker who can work out my server cluster and pay less for support, or should I buy the bigger, more costly software kit where any 12 year old can complete a setup in less than a day? For immediate deployment, hiring a skilled person and using open source is much more cost efficient, as support is a la carte. Obviously, this is still plenty profitable for the software company; Red Hat’s JBoss software supposedly brings in over 10$ in support profit for every dollar put into licence costs, which makes a 1000$ product (which is relatively cheap) become 10 000$ in profit at the end of the line.

Entreprise operating systems and apps aren’t the only things profitable, Firefox (sorry for the redundancy) brings in about 75 million $US to Mozilla by making Google the default search engine, and Auttomatic the makers of Wordpress, which counts less than 20 employees and do consulting and anti-spam services made close to 30 million greens last year, and their start product is Wordpress, a free personal publishing system. The list goes on and on, proving that open source IS a viable business model.
Hoping that the entire world of software will switch to open source is ridiculous, but what we can expect in the years to come is the breaking down in software components into smaller, more affordable parts, as to customize the user’s experience. Microsoft has learned this from Vista recently: not everybody wants to buy a product just because some big guy says it’s the new norm, shell out hundreds of dollars for the same old product in a new skin with a couple of tools added. Vista Ultimate is worth over 250$ for a home licence; who in their right mind will spend 1200$ on a computer to then spit out another quarter grand to get nice looking menus? The oldschool won’t die just yet, people still are willing to pay for software, but with more and more alternatives popping up here and there, something has to change, and open source just might be what software will be going towards.

I’ve been tired of flipping burgers for a while, and at some point I even was wondering if I would ever get paid to do something else then chain building junk food before obtaining higher education. After talking to a couple of friends and getting their encouragements to move on to somethig else, I made a man of myself and applied a second time at my local Futureshop, a Best Buy owned banner operating in most of Canada.

Now I know that here, BB and it’s affiliates aren’t really the most trusted vendors around here, and that pretty much everybody who posts here and knows his stuff has a story involving a BestBuy employee and his pet Fail-whale. Heck, before working at Futureshop, I had a couple of deviate opinions myself. But now that I work there, I talk with the technicians and realize that for that the staff over at that place really knows their stuff. Sure, some of the seasonal employees like myself have less knowledge of some areas, but overall, I was impressed of how much my colleges knew: every shift, I learn something new. 

The knowledgeable team, combined with my working environment which is basically a huge Toys R Us for grownups, makes it the closest I’ve seen to my dream job. There’s something about sales, salespeople will understand me, this little feeling you get when you know that you’ve taught your customer something relatively to what he was looking for, it makes me happy to a point where it’s pretty hard to describe. I’ll take the last two days for example: I’ve been selling quite a bit of routers and networking gear, and explaining wireles B/G/N inter-compatibility and gigabit ethernet to a customer who had stepped into the store with the simple intent of “buying a router” then hearing the said customer recall all the norms previously explained to him/her really gets me going. 

I never considered myself a good teacher, but for stuff I like, I seems like it just to come out naturally. I still have to work on the more technical side of my sales-speak and some product knowledge (like on printers, ), but otherwise, this job is my nirvana. 

There are just so many advantages compared to my old job, it’s incredible. There are no break scheduals as there used to be when a burger-flipper: the way it works is that if you feel you deserve a break, for a cigarette if you’re a smoker, you just got our there and puff off your craving. Because all the employees are commission payed, you’re the worst if you abuse this freedom: you’ll be closing less sales, and eventually your manager will holla back. On those slow Wednesday nights, you can feel free to have fun with the demos until you can help someone, because after all, it can only improve your products knowledge right? 

The staff is young and dynamic, and the ambiance really kicks arse. Bottom line, I’m happy with my new job. If you’re looking for your first tech-related jobs, Futureshop is something I’d definitely recommend. I honestly thought I wouldn’t be chosen because of my age: I’m sixteen and still in high school while the median age in the staff is about early 20s, but it turns out that they exert no discrimination about age, at least not at my local store. As long as you know your stuff, why not

Despite desperately trying and miserably failing at getting enough content to my existing blogs on a regular basis, I decided to start another blog, but this time on bikes. I would have loved to share all of this content here, but it’s kind of irrevelant to my current blog,  and I didn’t want to mix up anybody. And you know, besides that, it’s just way easy to organize that way.  This exerpt from the first post sums it all up pretty good.

Welcome, reader. My name is Maxime Rousseau, you can call Max, and I have started this blog to write about bikes, the pedal powered kind: bikes in general, my own two wheeled machines, and how I feel about what is going on in the industry.

Be expecting articles as regularly as on this blog and the OCN blog… one every new moon, approximately. I need to update my stuff more often. 

Anyways, check out Life on Bikes here, and grab a feed while you’re at it.

It’s been slow on the blog this month… in fact, for that last couple of months, my posts/week ratio has been getting awefully weaker, as if it wasn’t weak enough to begin with. So whats the reason for this? I had tons (read: megatons) of stuff do over the last weeks, and all those personal projects coupled with school, my McJob and spending a bit of time with the friends and family didn’t leave me lots of time to write up some stuff. The articles are written, thanks to all those wasted Economy class periods, but I just haven’t found the time to write them up.

Both of the above are part of the problem… ever since my first bike got stolen in late August, I’ve been hustling my ass off to get a working bike (to the left, commuter), and then as soon as I could I spilled another couple of greenies to get a working BMX (to the right). For the past month, the general rule has pretty much been “work as much as you can and buy the parts as fast as you can”, but for now both bikes still have to undergo serious modification and fixing to be in tip top form. Ever since my first bike got stolen, it seems that my passion for self-propelled two wheeled vehicles has grown exponentially… I’m now finding myself to put more money into my chain-propelled rides than some of my buddies are spending on their gasoline guzzlers, to a point where I almost totally stopped wanting to build, rebuild, and re-rebuild my computers as a hobby in order to save up for my whips. Those two are the first two of a long series: a third bike, a scratch-build track bike this time, aka fixie, is scheduled to be started by summer of ‘09.

After building my first computer WAYYY back and trying to mod it to my tastes, I grew a taste for nice looking cases and chopping the latter up. When I saw the Rocketfish case for the first time in an Overclock.net case mod work log, I fell in love, and when I saw a member of OCN who had bought 3 (at 50$ it’s a steal) sell those for 60$ a pop, I jumped right on it and purchased despite the pretty steep shipping costs for such a big box to across the border.  Today, despite the fact that it took some time to get something done between disassembling the whole thing to getting some actual modding done, I like how the case is turning out. Sanding, chopping, painting and reassembling this huge full tower ain’t a one hour thing… So that’s kept me busy too. I don’t know where I’m headed to with this thing, but either reselling it to cover at least cost price (which is now at about 250$, man hours not included) to buy a laptop or getting sponsors to actually put some hardware in there would be nice. Either way, I’m having tons of fun playing with brain-numbing acrylic laquer and power tools. Check out the work log!

When I’m not at school doing all of the above and/or working and studying, which is already a pretty big workload at 30 hours of school per week in addition to 20-25 hours of work, I’m constantly getting emailed by the fine folks at Condistes.org, a french language which I put up voluntarily for a community of campers who use specific Westfalia-style vehicles. There’s always a link missing (french lanuage PHPbb + english theme = fail), a problem with one’s password, spam to get taken care of, or whatever else. Sure, I’m missing out on making a couple of bucks off of a couple of community members, but it’s a nice thing to put in a portfolio.

Yup. I’m that kind of person now. I bought the game to play with a couple of real life friends on those cold winter days, or to have something to do with my time when I can’t ride my bike, go to school, work, or work on my other projects for whatever reason.  Waste of time? Probably. But a guy’s gotta relax somehow.

It’s a busy life, as they say. I’ll try to update more, but I can’t guarantee. If you like my stuff to the point where you absolutely have to read everything I write (yeah right), be aware that I have a hardware-oriented blog down at overclock.net. Grab a feed!

I’ve been watching online videos even before Youtube got popular, and I’ve seen my share of the other flash based video distribution system from other places, like the ones at Metacafe or Collegehumour. At first I thought the difference in quality that the &fmt=18 Youtube hack (now accessible on each page where higher quality is accessible) was the best thing ever, and it was only many months after that I checked out the in-house system at CollegeHumour and realized how awesome the quality was. Sure, the load times were considerably longer, but if that’s the price to pay for content that looks good full screen on a 720p TV, than I’ll wait the 5 minutes if I have to.

And after seeing both of these systems, I realized that they don’t even come close to what Vimeo has to offer. Now I know, for many Vimeo is no news, but I’ve just been introduced to the thing by the BMX industry, which uses Vimeo a lot to post up high quality web edits and teasers for bike enthousiasts to enjoy. Unlike Youtube, Vimeo works with a monthly upload limit, not a time per video limit like Youtube does, which allows them to regulate the amount of videos added, while not sacrificing any quality. Also unlike Youtube, 720p HD is fully supported! While the image quality, even in non HD mode, is tons better than on Youtube, high def is where it’s really at. You have to see it to beleive it really.  I was pleasantly surprised about the load times too: although it takes a considerable amount of time to load the video, it’s not as bad as the other systems I’ve seen featuring higher definition. A bit thing that has been hurting Youtube a lot also is very poor support of the more and more popular widescreen formats. 16:9 is the norm, yet I still get those ugly black bars on Youtube, as if the video window wasn’t small enough. Vimeo has full support of 16:9, and probably does support other cinematographic formats without wonky up your video files, although I haven’t checked. But then again, if you’re shooting in 2.35:1, your most likely to release your content on Bluray disc, not on the internet.

Apart from just raw picture quality, I think the Vimeo site is just overall better designed. Stuff like making time indications in questions like “What’s that in the corner at 1:28” into hyperlinks to that part of the video is just pure genious. I feel that the comments system is also easier to read, but that’s just me.

And also, Vimeo has this little feeling to it that you get when you use something that’s not mainstream yet, this little thing that tickles the anticonformist inside all of us. But seriously, being less mainstream means that you’re less likely to fall on shitty reposts, poorly ripped TV shows, and japanese 14 year olds waving to the camera in a hotel room in New York, and other crap of the like.

So to recapitulate, for small sub-90 second clips there’s Flickr Video, for the masses and visibility there’s Youtube, and if what you want is to distribute high quality content for display on say, your website, and don’t really care about people not finding your stuff while just browsing, Vimeo is what you want.

More original content. Higher quality. Do check it out, and use it to upload!

I found this user on Youtube about a month ago, and I thought I might share it and give him linkage, because the stuff is outstanding. If you’re into photography and the gear used in the latter, you have to check this out.

Lilkiwi87, aka Joseph Spina, is a 20 year old pro photographer currently working for the National Geographic. The dude’s packing a Master’s in Photography, and his education combined with incredible experience from working for the world’s most reknown magazine makes him a reference for anything photography. Joseph decided to make his youtube profile into a one stop source for photography tutorials and info on Nikon gear. Despite joining only 6 months ago, Joseph has posted 83+ videos containing outstanding Nikon gear reviews and in-camera how-tos, as well as more general tutorials on photography that can be applied to any camera, concerning stuff from bokeh to how to clean filters correctly. Heck, for you real photography wizzes, he also seems to enjoy giving away high end gear once in a while, making the giveaways into questionnaires that are insanely tough.

What I really like is that unlike many big Youtubers, he actually takes the time to respond to many of the comments posted on his video, given they are relevant, and what surprised me most, he gives out his EMAIL (!) on his profile, inviting beginner photographers to ask their questions directly. This guy churns out OUTSTANDING videos, both quality and content wise, yet he keeps it real and stays friendly with the photo noobs like myself.

I don’t know why he doesn’t have over 1k subscribers yet… his stuff is tight.

Check out his youtube channel, and be sure to subscribe! You also might be interested in his personal website, which contains a crapload of photography tips, tuts, and articles also.

This is the late 2000’s, the age of the new web. The mailing list is dead and gone, and now RSS is the tool that everybody and there grandmothers use to stay in touch with whatever, from the newest gadgets featured on tech sites like Engadget to serious-business news coming straight from CNN. I think RSS is great, but what it lacks is organization. I don’t like polluting my Google Reader with feeds from big blogs, because they usually bury the good content from my blogroll buddies with millions of articles concerning the newest solid gold iPhone, which I don’t really give a crap about.  For a while I used to have 35 RSS gadgets on my iGoogle page, but that lacks practicality too: load times for all those feeds is huge, and I rarely scroll to the bottom, so I end up missing some stuff most of the time.

I thought that it would be a wicked thing to have some kind of tool that merges feeds, with using a full featured desktop RSS reader.  After hours on hours of googling around, and Nick suggesting Yahoo Pipes which I never really got a stab at, I finally found a simple PHP script that does a wonderful job of merging RSS feeds in chronological order. There’s a version for both PHP4 and PHP5, but SimpleXML is required in the latter. It looks like a pretty underground piece of code, but it gets the job done. I’ve started compiling feeds by subject, so now my feeds are all tidily sorted.

Check out it here. I know, a .CC domain is kinda suspicious (it’s the first time I see a non spam site on those domains), but the stuff is totally legit. Mad props to the coder.

It seems like summer drives me in this sort of vegetative state: once school is over, I just go home, and it’s like I don’t know what to do of my days so I just sit around and browse some forums, work occasionally, and hang out with friends when possible. When I’m in summer mode, nothing never is critical: if I’m poor, then I just stay home or borrow, if something needs to be done it can always wait a couple more days, and even my McJob, which I usually get sick off when working over 20 hours a week, now looks like something that just happens. I do nothing at home, go to work, do the stuff I’m asked for 4, 6 ,8 hours, then go back home feeling…. well not feeling anyway specific at all. I just drone through my days, and I don’t think about much.

Totally the opposite of when I’m at school, where everything’s important. I HAVE TO finish this paper, I HAVE TO get my bike repaired, I HAVE TO update my blog once a week. I end up having sleeping disorders because of all the stuff I think about.

I kinda like summer mode. Very relaxing…

However, after a month and a half in this vegetative state, my parents mentionned something that slapped me right out of it. Next year, I’m in grade 11, and here in Quebec, that means that I have to register for CEGEP. If you’re not familiar with CEGEP, it’s basically the higher end of senior high, but in a more University-ish kind of way. This ain’t high school anymore. You get specialized classes, but you also get funky schedules(courses at 8 PM, days without any courses), and the buildings are built like Universities too: there are many buildings with many wings, and big CEGEPS usually have 5000+ students.

Now don’t get me wrong, it ain’t the chance that’s scaring me: it’s the choices I have to make. Do I move out and study in Montreal, do I complete my education here in my home town, do I move out even if I stay here, what college do I attend to, with what institutions do I apply for an educational loan? All those questions have to be answered before registrations, which will be held at the end of winter 2009, which is about 7 months away. In 8-9 months from now, I’ll be accepted somewhere, and starting my career specific eduction. In 8-9 months from now I’ll be a couple of months into my 17 years of age, and in exactly a year and a week from now, I’ll be a CEGEP freshman.

If I were to have it my way, I’d get accepted to work at a Futureshop in Montreal or it’s suburbs, and I’d complete my pre-unversity education in some English language CEGEP in Montreal in a tech-related program, where I could avoid the dreaded French mothertoungue exams, to then move on to complete my studies at the UQ’s ETS, a reknown engineering school, possibly the best one within my reach. I would then be hunted down by a headhunter who would offer my a 6 figure yearly salary to work as an IT guy in some big business. I would later return to school for some further specialized education, to then become the spokesman for whatever company, earn lots, have a sideline building kickass custom PCs, buy my dream BMW, have a girlfriend to whom I would make many babies, and live happily ever after till the day of my death.

It’s a bit early to talk about the stuff after engineering school, but the perspective of moving out to the big city has me browning my shorts. Can you imagine yours truly, fresh out of the womb at 17, barely able to remember to flush the toilet, living with two other young dudes or gals in a 4 room apartment, living off Reese Pieces and Coca Cola trying to hustle up the money to pay the landlord? No more spending all my paychecks on a computer, a new back wheel for my BMX. Beyond this point, it’s serious business: heating bills, phone bills, garage bills, parking tickets, work, more work, and less play. My parents want me to stay home and attend the local CEGEP and unversity, which are far from the best. But what do I sacrifice, the quality of my education or the quality of my lifestyle?

In a sense, it’s got me hyped, because this is where the real freedom really starts, where I get to study the stuff I want with people sharing my interests, not learning crap with a class half filled with morons. But on the other side of the medal, I know it’s gonna be a rough ride.

Scary shit. I guess I just have to think it over until it sounds right.

In this post, I explore how hard drive makers have spent too much time and effort making drives only bigger and faster, and not thinking about making more products tailored to what the consumer needs, and how there are many segments that are still open to whoever wants to take them.

The hardware industry in itself is constantly changing, but one sector that has particularly evolved over the years is the disk storage sector. Nowadays, everybody from hardcore enthusiasts like we OCN-ers to our formerly computer illiterate grandparents are now juggling around with voluminous files, music, movies, and large collections of high-resolution digital pictures, so the overall demand for bigger, faster drives just keeps growing.

Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital and all the other hard drives giants are well aware of this trend, and thanks to ferocious competition amongst themselves, great milestones have been reached. A terabyte of raw storage is now something that pretty much any willing person can afford, redundant and stripped storage via RAID is now within everybody’s reach thanks to integration to many chipset solutions (think P35+ICH9R and later, nearly all Nvidia chipsets since the 5 series), drives are quieter, faster and more energy efficient than ever before, and most importantly, cost per gigabyte is rock bottom, below 0.20$/GB in many cases.

All this progress has me thrilled, however, I think that it is time to reconsider how we use our disk drives, and other means of storage on non-removable media. It seems that too much emphasis is put on making hard drives, bigger, faster, when maybe all we need to do is to think up and create mission-specific storage products, as to better suit the needs of every user and every machine, specially in these days where many people have more than one computer fulfilling more than one task.

One of my best articles this year if you ask me. Critics are more than welcome, feel free to leave your own point of vue either here (no registration required) or on the OCN blog, which requires membership to comment.

Read the entire article at my OCN hardware blog.