Mindstab.net

So I'd like to be able to do lots of upgrades for my systems. My desktop, Inferno, is 5 years old, and can't take new video cards (PCI-E) and new hard drives (SATA). I'd really like to replace Inferno with a computer capable of "Unreal Tournament 3" and "Enemy Territories: Quake Wars" and with massively upgraded storage since Inferno's hard drives are full. Also, it seems now my laptop, Nika, has chosen to start exhibiting power problems and randomly turn off when I don't look away. It actually appears to be a quantum problem because as long as I'm watching Nika, nothing goes wrong, but as soon as I turn away or go away, she fritzs and powers down.

Sadly, I have a limited budget, so my best plan seems to be to try and wait for hardware prices to drop or for me to earn some more money.

However, one upgrade has "suddenly" become possible. For a long time external hard drive enclosures have been decently expensive and also kind of limited (maximum hard drive size of not very large) however now, I've noticed new ultra cheap hard drive enclosures ($35 CDN) hitting the market with reasonable upper limits (1TB). So I'm quite excited. This takes care of one of my problems. I'm going to grab one of those babies ASAP and a 500GB hard drive (currently the GB/$ sweet spot for hard drives) and solve one of my problems.

Rob seems to indicate this break through in hard drive enclosures is brought to us by the fact that they seem to have developed a chip(s) that do everything needed to run the thing and so they can now mass produce them cheaply (where as before there was presumably a small CPU and some software which cost plenty more than a chip or two). So yeah for complex algorithm to chip break through! I get cheap new toys.