New Toy: D-Link DNS-323 Network Storage Device

OK, so as much as I appreciate how inexpensive it now is to purchase a 1 TB hard drive, it wasn't only for nostalgic value. My plan is to set up a single file storage area and start cleaning up all the files I've collected over the years. Most of them are digital photos and video. A huge portion of the files on my computers are camp-related: pictures, music, forms, and documents going all the way back to when I started volunteering in 1994.

My ideal scenario was this:

• Networked, so I can access files from any computer in the house
• Media streaming of all my music, videos and photos to my PS3, and devices I could potentially get in the future (like an Apple TV, internet radio, whole-house audio, etc.)
• Low power consumption, since by definition a device like this stays idle about 99% of the time
• Reliable, including ways to make backups of the data
  
• Accessible over the internet

Most of the criteria pointed to a standalone NAS device, but many of them are expensive, and at the time, people had all kinds of issues with PS3 compatibility. For a while I thought the answer was going to be to buy an old PC and run media software like TVersity. Then a few days ago I had another good look at the D-Link DNS-323. I had dismissed it last time I looked, but in the year since then, new firmware updates fixed a lot of the issues that were once show-stoppers. Now it should fill all my needs, and I got a good deal on one too (you know who you are -- thanks!)

A nice thing I discovered about the DNS-323 is that it is pretty much a tiny Linux PC, so it will be possible to install all kinds of tools onto it including media servers, web servers, and all sorts of other interesting hacks.

To help with power consumption and heat, the 1 TB hard drive I bought was a Western Digital Caviar "green" series, WD10EADS, which claims the lowest power consumption at only 2.8 watts. I might even buy a second one later, and set up the NAS in RAID 1 mode for even greater reliability.

Now to start copying all my files over!

I'll take a trillion, please...

I will never forget the day my dad brought home my first PC. It was an Intel 386, running at 25 MHz, and it had 4 megabytes of RAM and a 52 megabyte hard drive. Up until then I'd only had an Apple ][ clone to play with. The PC, that plain beige box running MS-DOS, was a thing of beauty. Going into eighth grade, it meant so much to me to finally have a real computer! (You need to understand that, in grade 7, I was writing up school assignments on a typewriter. Using WordPerfect was a HUGE step up.) And 52 megabytes of storage was a dream. Back then, files were simpler, smaller, and I could pretty much account for every single one of those 52 million bytes.

But it didn't take long for even 52 million bytes to start getting filled up, and two years later it was time to upgrade. I made a deal with a guy in my grade 10 Manufacturing Technology class (read: welding class). He was a sketchy character, and I never knew if we were friends or enemies -- but today we were doing business. He had a hard drive for sale. 80 megabytes. $80. "A dollar a meg -- that sounds fair, doesn't it?"

That was 15 years ago. Every few years, computer technology kept improving, everyone started amassing more and more files, and I kept buying bigger hard drives. It doesn't seem that long ago that I built a PC with video editing in mind, with a 10 GB main hard drive and 20 GB for data. The interesting thing is how the price points haven't changed much over the years, compared to the leaps and bounds in storage capacity. I paid about $100 for a 160 GB hard drive a couple of years ago. $100 bought me a 250 GB portable USB hard drive last year.

And $100 bought me a 1 terabyte hard drive yesterday. 1 terabyte is 1 trillion bytes. To put it another way, that's almost 20,000 times bigger than that 52 MB drive I owned in 1991. At the 1993 prices of "a dollar a meg", this much storage would have set me back one million dollars.

Conclusion: hard drive storage is 10,000 times cheaper today than it was 15 years ago. And still dropping!

OK, I admit that it's kind of geeky to be fascinated by that.

How long will this one last?

Jay has a blog!

Again.

I started with LiveJournal, then migrated to a WordPress setup on my own host. And now I'm here on Blogger.

I'm not convinced I'll be able to keep up a blog to the point of entertaining readers, but I've been encouraged to give it a try. I expect I'll share adventures from geocaching, stories and experiences from my volunteer involvement with summer camp, thoughts on technology, and life in general.

There, that sounds pretty exciting already.