Where have I been lately?  Off the grid.  What originally started as a personal decision has now turned into a technical necessity:  The hard disks in my main machine have blown and we’re broke until I get paid next month.  I know I have other machines, but I’ve used this one machine for all of my main communication (email, IM, etc.) that it doesn’t feel “right” working on another machine for my day-to-day stuff.  Call me anal.

Next month’s payday is, conveniently, my birthday, so I will reward myself with two brand new hard drives.  Nothing fancy; I’ll probably do what I always do when buying hard drives:

1. Go to newegg.com
2. Look at every single hard drive with the specs I’m interested in; for example:
   • SATA or PATA
   • 3  year warranty at bare minimum
   • etc.
3. Divide the cost of the drive by # of gigabytes to get cost per gigabyte

…and pick the drive with the best value.

Why two drives?  Because I hate losing data due to circumstances beyond my control.  Must… mirror… data…