Never enough disk space

Throughout the year I will be watching the prices of hard drives, particularly 2 terabyte drives for my home computer. I currently have a pair of Samsung 1 TB SATA drives in a RAID 1 array. I am using the the RAID controller built into my ASUS M2N-E motherboard, but may look into a better controller.

Currently 2 terabyte drives are about $350 Canadian. I paid just about $100 each for my 1 TB drives late last year. We'll see how long it takes for the 2 TB drive to get down to $100. Hopefully by early 2010. 1.5 TB drives are currently about $150 and seem to be steady for the moment.

I'm pretty paranoid about losing my data, so in addition to the RAID array, I have another large internal drive, as well as an external drive for backup.

Next time I have to rebuild my system, I'll make a Ghost image of the basic drive (less programs and data) and store it on DVD or portable drive. I use Symantec Ghost Suite 2 at work and it seems to work great with network or local backups.

Getting back to hard drives, the worst part is that these new drives seem to generate a ton of heat. I bought a pair of Noctua 120mm case fans to keep my system cool. This is in addition to the power supply fan, the CPU heat sink fan and the graphics card fan. The Noctua fans at $20 each weren't cheap, but were some of the best around. All of my fans were purchased with noise level in mind. Maybe one day when I have more time and money, I'll try to build a really quiet computer.

GPS shopping

I've been shopping around for a new GPS recently. We had bought one a year ago, similar to the one pictured above. A very nice LG unit. Large screen, all the bells and whistles. We had it for about two weeks before returning it. It was on sale at Sears. The problem with it was that LG was no longer updating any of the maps for that unit. I found this out as we were planning a trip to Niagara Falls. While mapping the route through Hamilton, Ontario, one particular highway was not shown. I knew the highway was less than a year old, and checking the LG website, I found out that updated maps were not going to be made for my particular model.
We used the GPS on the trip, and as we drove down the new highway, the GPS showed us offroading through hills and valleys constantly telling us to turn towards the nearest road. The next GPS we buy will be updateable and probably a large name brand like Garmin or TomTom. I'll keep you updated.

Eneloop Slow Discharge Batteries

A week ago I picked up these batteries from Costco (I stole this pic from the web). They are Sanyo Eneloop Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) rechargable batteries. The package was $39 Canadian for 4 AA, 4 AAA a home charger and car adapter. I also picked up extra batteries (another set of AAs and C and D adapters). We'll be going through a ton of batteries in the near future as we picked up a Nintento Wii and I need some for my camera equipment as well.

The Eneloop are supposed to keep their charge even when stored for long periods of time. Sanyo claim the batteries will lose 15% of their charge in a year, compared to 1% per day for other similar batteries. I'll be testing that as I have a set in my camera flash which I seldom use. It seemed to be a good deal and we may get more for our AV remotes around the house.

Where to get computer stuff

Since I mentioned my newest toy. I should say I bought it at a Tigerdirect store in Toronto. They have five stores in the Toronto area with a lot of cool computer stuff. If you're in the Toronto area, look them up at www.tigerdirect.ca. I've also purchased from their website a few times for work. We get a good deal because we're a large company.

For the the best mail order prices in Canada, I buy from either NCIX, www.ncix.com based in British Columbia, or their sister company (more like the same company) DirectCanada, www.directcanada.com. Both have great deals and weekly specials. Since I don't live in BC, I save on the provincial sales tax, and sometimes I think they ship from their Ontario warehouse.

That being said, I also try to shop at my local stores when the price for an item is anywhere in the neighborhood of the mail order stores. I have been trying harder lately to support the local stores with the economy in the dumper.

Not quite digital TV

Okay, I'm probably the only one left that doesn't have a nice large LCD/Plasma digital TV. Even my parents have one. Money's is a little tight this year, so I bought a pc to tv converter from a TigerDirect store.

This is a KWorld PC to TV convertor which connects from a pc/laptop video port to the video port of an analog tv. Although the maximum resoultion was 1024 x 768, it worked fine and the AVI movie I downloaded from the internet looked good on our old 27" CRT TV. It cost about $56 Canadian. I did have to buy an adapter that went from the headphone jack of the laptop to the audio cables (not included) that went to the TV. Until we get a nice digital TV and a home theatre PC, this is a good temporary fix for playing downloaded videos.