Monthly Archives: March 2004

Odd Thoughts

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I’ve been porting some code over to Linux and in the process I’ve discovered what slow really is. I tend to work on only one computer system, my PowerBook G4, so I loaded up SuSE 8.2 Linux into Virtual PC. I’m not sure I understood what slow really is until now. It’s painfully slow, compared to running Windows XP on Virtual PC. I suspect that what’s really going on is the lack of optimization for Linux and a really slow gcc compiler. Ah, well — the price one pays for carrying around a single computer.

On another note, I’ve started reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. It’s been on my reading list for a long time, but I had never gotten around to it. I picked it up at the urging of a friend who said that the book was “me”. Well, as a motorcyclist (HD Road King), I could definitely relate to much of what Pirsig says is the beauty of motorcycling. One quote I just read really stood out to me:

The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.

I’ve been rolling that around in my head for the last few hours since I first read it and it’s just a fascinating statement. I’d love to say something about it, but you know, there’s just nothing to add. Just enjoy it.

If You Manage Disk Storage, Get Ready To Find A New Career

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A colleague of mine told me recently that IT companies who sell disk management products will be out of business soon because of how cheap disk storage has become (similarly those of you who have made a career out of managing disk storage will need to find a new job soon). Case in point — I just purchased a LaCie d2 triple interface hard drive. For about $300 (including shipping), I just added 250 GB of storage to my network. Folks, that’s pushing really hard on about a $1 per GB (in this configuration $1.20 per GB). And this an external drive with USB 2.0, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800 — triple interface — in a sleek metal case.

And that’s nothing. You can also buy a 1 TB unit from these guys for about $1200 (I almost did!). If you are looking for more storage, this is the unit to get — it’s about the least expensive on the market and it appears to be well constructed and elegant.

I bought the unit because of the music and photos clogging my puny 40 GB hard disk in my P4 system. The firewire drives are snappy from a disk access perspective. It feels plenty fast for anything I’d ever use it for. My biggest complaint is that Microsoft doesn’t support formatting the drive as FAT32 for units this large, so I had to go NTFS. That’s going to limit my ability to plug the drive into my PowerBook but I don’t really anticipate doing that real soon anyway. Hell, maybe I’ll just buy a second drive if I need to have on for the Mac.

The point is that disk storage is getting so cheap that the companies involved in the disk management business are going to be out of it soon. If you can buy a terabyte for $1000, who needs to manage disk storage?