I have loved computers since that Christmas break long, long ago when my brother in law and I stayed up all night playing Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure on his Apple II.  Later, I spent countless hours playing Starflight and writing shareware games on an IBM clone.  Even later, I wrote and recorded hundreds of songs and took my home office paperless, all on my trusty computer.  In order to learn as much as possible about computers, I started building my own.  It makes me a little sad to realize that my beloved is quickly becoming irrelevant.

But the fact remains they are, because we just don’t need them anymore.  A confederacy of other devices have stolen all the fun and turned the once proud computer into an over-priced media server or typewriter.  The addition of an HP MediaSmart Server to my home network removes even the data storage role from my desktop computer’s job description.

So how did it happen?

Let’s start with games.  I have fond memories of late nights playing all sorts of computer games, from the excellent until abandoned Front Page Sports games to most of the Civilizations.  Then came Nintendo, the PSP, the X-Box and, finally, the Wii.  I held out during the PSP and X-Box era, but one game of Mario Kart on my kids’ Wii was all it took to convince me that the computer is an ineffective and obsolete gaming platform.  From this point on, it’s all about Mississippi Queen on Guitar Hero.

For email the herd has migrated to the iPhone and other lesser, but effective, devices.  We also use text messaging a lot more that we used to.  My family uses Beejive IM on our iPhones and iPod Touches, both to allow the kids to text from their iPods and to avoid the cost of traditional text messaging.  For music, we have our iPhones and iPods, AppleTV and, most recently, the ability to hear and display Pandora through our home theater system, via Samsung’s excellent BD-P2550 blu-ray player.  The Pandora application on this box is easy and beautiful.  It shows the last few songs played, with album art, and lets you easily switch between stations.  You can also watch your Netflix instant queue on this box.  It’s a brilliant strategy for the DVD makers to go on the offensive in the turf war.  PC makers have been trying, unsuccessfully, to displace DVD players for years.

If you just want to rent movies online or easily access your home movies, there is no better solution that AppleTV and iTunes.  Again, except for a server tucked in a closet somewhere, no computer needed.

All of this leaves the computer in the unenviable role of typewriter.  Sure, we need typewriters.  We use them every day.  But we don’t love them.  Or think of them as fun.  And, sadly for the PC makers, we don’t want to pay much for them.  So all these new devices steal the fun and the dollars, while the once mighty computer becomes a commodity, like paper, pens and other office supplies

In August of 2004, I built a mighty fine computer from the ground up.  It had everything I needed, and it served me well for three years.

But boy was it loud.  Jet engine loud.  A fanless video card and an insulated case didn’t achieve the level of quiet I was hoping for.  Turning the fans down helped a little, but if I wasn’t careful it would get really hot.  Sometimes spontaneous reboot hot.  So I cranked the fans back up and soldiered noisily along.

I used two internal hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration, and two removable SATA hard drives for music and video storage.  That worked OK, but in hindsight I should have used RAID 1.  Over time, I started feeling nervous about data loss.  A couple of months ago, I started to have hard drive and boot configuration issues.  I started thinking about a new computer.

Then, as fate would have it, both of my computer gurus, Ed Bott and Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, bought and/or started to build new computers.  Both based on the Intel Intel Core 2 Q6600 chip.  Quad core, 2.4GHz.  Hmmm.

This past weekend, I had more boot configuration problem.  I can fix just about any computer problem, but when I spend too much time fixing something that ought to just work, I get irritable and frustrated.  Call it the Car Rule.  Application of the Car Rule to my loud, boot-challenged computer mandated- mandated I tell ya – that I get a new one.

I didn’t want to wait for the parts to arrive, and I was a little worried that if I built one from scratch I might end up with another jet engine sounding box.  So I did it the lazy way.

I bought an HP Pavilion m8150n.  I switched out the video card in favor of a GeForce 8600 GT card, for the dual DVI outputs (I am a devout believer in the dual monitor efficiency advantage).  I added an HP personal media removable hard drive (which slides into the slot to the left of the HP logo in the picture) to give me a almost a terabyte of storage, and to allow for hassle free back up.

Presto, I have a new computer that works like a charm.  And it’s very quiet.  As I type this, the only sound I hear is from the fan inside my AV cabinet 10 feet behind me.  The computer at my feet is virtually silent.

It wasn’t the cheapest way to go, but for a little over $1700 I have a new, quiet computer.

Now, about that fan in my AV cabinet…

Room 101 has a very cool post that shows the evolution of the computer desktop, starting with the Macintosh System 1 in 1984 and Windows 1.0 in 1985 all the way through Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows Vista.

You can click the images for larger images.

This post combined with the even better Graphical User Interface Gallery is a pretty comprehensive reference.

C|Net reports that terabyte (that’s 1,000 gigabytes) hard drives will likely be available by the end of the year.

The article goes on to say:

Granted, few people really need 1 terabyte of storage. But it sounds cool–sort of like you could be running a ballistic missile tracking site in your den. Besides, humans continue to show that they can come up with ways to gobble up hard drive space.

I can think of a lot of people who need that much storage, even if they don’t know it.

1) People (like me) who have years of raw and edited video footage they want to keep accessible for later use. I eventually burn my home video onto a DVD, but I like the redundancy of having it on my computer as well. Plus, having it on my computer allows me to more easily grab clips for later projects.

2) People (like me) who make music. I have tons of music tracks and many versions of a lot of my songs. Sure I could put them on DVDs and lose them, but why do that when storage is so cheap.

3) People who use their computers to record television shows and movies.

4) Families (like mine) who aspire to have central data storage for security and backup purposes. Everyone needs at least 250 gigabytes of storage and 1,000 divided by 4 is 250.

And most importantly…

5) People who want to create and administer a backup system that works. Every single one of the backup products out there is at least three times more complicated than it needs to be- which is why most people do not back up their data sufficiently. I decided a long time ago to forgo the brain damage of trying to create backup sets (and then to have to access and install them after a drive failure). Backups are like parachutes- there’s no way to test them until its too late.

It is much easier to have an extra hard drive, either in your computer or on your network, and simply copy all of your data to that drive, in its natural, uncompressed form. In fact, it is easier to clone your entire hard drive than it is to set up most backup programs. And if you have a drive failure, all you have to do is replace the bad drive with the backup drive and you’re off to the races.

I have over a terabyte of storage on the computer I am using right now- in a RAID array and in 2 other permanent and 2 other removable drives. It’s not easy to get that many drives to co-exist peacefully in one machine.

If I could have one terabyte drive in my computer and another on my network for backup, I would be in hard drive heaven.

So would you, even if you don’t know it yet.

UPDATE: Mike Miller points out in a Comment that Best Buy is selling a terabyte external hard drive right now. It’s not clear to me if that enclosure contains a single drive or multiple ones. My hunch is that is contains multiple drives, and thus the RAID configuration reference in the specifications.

Tags: computers, storage