Massive storage, PC to TV connections and other unrelated stuff

[chronic]

... weird little gadget here on the table.

What is that weird little gadget and where can I get one? My Mac Pro is pretty easy to swap drives in and out of but all the bays are full and I still have to shut it down and disconnect all of the various cables to do it. I have a couple of loose internals I need to access from time to time and it's kind of a pain to go through to grab one or two files off of one of these drives.

I need me one of them thar things, sho nuff n yes I do.

 

[mjp]

Here you go. At only $35 I'd have to rank it among the great deals of the young century.

It only works for SATA drives though. It's SATA to USB. I don't know what your Mac uses (ah - Google says Mac Pro is SATA, so you sould be okay). I searched in vain for a similar IDE device (because I have old drives I want to get at sometimes too), but the only one I could find was cumbersome and expensive. So I just bought the huge SATA drive and took the time to install, uninstall, blah, blah, blah and dump those old drives on to it. Now everything is in one place.

A terabyte, by the way, is a shitload of space. I believe that's the technical term. I dumped four old hard drives, all of our old backup drives, 400 CDs worth of music (both uncompressed .wavs and 320k MP3s of each CD) on to the thing and it's only 25% full.

 

[number6horse]

mjp - Is that one of those funky Mexican, Catholic (santaria ?) candles sitting on the desk ? The kind with blessings written in both Spanish and English on them ? Make sure you get one that protects against gunpowder explosions.

 

[chronic]

Thanks mjp. I always thought that a hard drive dock would be a great idea but never did any research into whether anyone was actually making one already. Apparently there are several on the market.

A terabyte is a lot of space, but by todays standards and depending on what you use them for, maybe not so much. I have four 640GB drives in my computer, the two loose 320GB internal drives that I mentioned before and two 300GB external drives and I would say that they are around 85% full. When I figured out how to get HD output from my computer to my 42" plasma, I started filling them up with movies and flacs. In terms of physical space, it beats the shit out of having bookcases full of DVDs. And the cost of storage just keeps going down. I bought three of my 640GB internals about a year ago and now you can get a 1.5TB drive for just a little more than what one of the 640s cost then.

Maybe someday I'll be able to upload myself onto a drive in order to eliminate some more wasted space. I'm sure that would make my wife very happy.

Gonna order one of these puppies now. Thanks again.

By the way, newegg.com has this model for $20 each as an open box item right now, though I think I'll buy a new one.

 

[mjp]

mjp - Is that one of those funky Mexican, Catholic (santaria ?) candles sitting on the desk ?

Yeah, it's a Virgin of Guadalupe candle, but I see the other side with "St. John of the Lakes" on it is facing out. I don't know who the hell St. John of the Lakes is, but Guadalupe is painted onto about 9,000 walls in Los Angeles. The candles are only 99 cents at most grocery stores, so my purposes are emergency and mood lighting related, not religious. I'm sure they have some magic use to believers, but if they really had magic candles - think about it - they would probably be more than 99 cents.

A terabyte is a lot of space, but by todays standards and depending on what you use them for, maybe not so much.

True, I don't store movies digitally. But I have to say I'm impressed at how many really big raw images and uncompressed music you can jam onto these things. But for $100 (or less) per TB these days, why not store movies.

When I figured out how to get HD output from my computer to my 42" plasma...

How do you do that? I started looking into it once but didn't really need to do it at that very moment, so I lost interest when the first couple articles I came across were way too geeked out for me. I have HDMI inputs on the TV, but only a 15 pin whatchamacallit output on the computer...

Maybe someday I'll be able to upload myself onto a drive in order to eliminate some more wasted space.

Google labs is already working on that. But even after they release it it'll be in beta forever, so I don't know.

 

[chronic]

How do you do that? I started looking into it once but didn't really need to do it at that very moment, so I lost interest when the first couple articles I came across were way too geeked out for me. I have HDMI inputs on the TV, but only a 15 pin whatchamacallit output on the computer...

When I first looked into it I had the same problem... it sounded like I was going to need to jump through all kinds of hoops to get it to work (I even started looking into getting a TVIX media box) but, as it turned out, all I had to do was use a VGA cable and connect it directly (the Mac has two VGA-out ports) and install a shareware app (SwitchResX) that allows you to add a non-native monitor profile (this eliminates the horizontal stretching that you get if you just plug it in and play it). A file with 720P resolution almost fills the entire screen at 100% and in full-screen mode (using VLC) it looks really good. My processor is not quite fast enough to play 1080P files without some stuttering (especially during scenes with a lot of motion) but with my 51 year-old eyes, 720P is plenty. Even stuff like Netflix streaming and smaller 480I files look pretty good on the plasma... at least as good (and usually better) than standard resolution TV broadcasts.

The only problem, and it's not really a problem... I've just been too lazy to get the cable and set it up... is that the audio is coming through my external computer speakers instead of the TV so I can't use the TV remote to control the volume. All I need to do is get a splitter to fix this but I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

 

[mjp]

Thanks, that certainly sounds do-able. I'll have to see if the TV has a VGA input. I'm sure it does - it has a dozen inputs of varying size and mystery. SwitchResX is Mac-only, but I should be able to find a comparable PC program.

 

[cirerita]

You could try Powerstrip. It was the best one a couple of years ago.
http://entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm

 

[mjp]

Cool, will do.

 

[mjp]

I need me one of them thar things, sho nuff n yes I do.

They make one now that will hold two drives. Makes backing up your backups (you do that, right?) about a million times easier. I don't know if this is new or just new to me, but you can't have too many hard drive toasters. Can you?

 

[number6horse]

And on a loosely-related technological note, here's how we've all CHANGED since about 1996