Thanksgiving day. Traditionally this is a day off from work and a good day to perform home work like installing new hardware. This year is no exception. My 40 Gig HD failed and I lost all my MP3s. 400 USD and 2 hours later I have 60 Gig of RAID 1 storage on my file server behind a RAID controller.

That is, there are two physical hard disk drives behind the logical drive. If one drive fails the data is still safe and sound on the other one. Most of that 2 hours are actually spent formatting the drive. The installation took only 10 minutes.

I took the opportunity to vacuum the inside of the PC and dust off the dirt using compressed air (which I have to buy)! I also split up the CD-RW drive from the CD-ROM drive's IDE controller, so now I can copy CD to CD directly without first saving the data to the hard disk. Much faster. And I finally connected the analog audio outs from the CD drives to the Sound Blaster Live Value sound card. So I can play normal music also on this box.

What a productive Thanksgiving. Now I have to re-rip my music CD's all over again.

For the technically minded -- the setup is a Promise FastTrack 100 TX2 controller and two seagate EIDE 60 Gig 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda ATA drives, model ST360021A. I bought them from PCS for Everyone in Cambridge.