using the sata drives here allows one to easily create a software RAID5 yielding a redundant and massive amount of storage for an incredibly low price per gig.

A little history on my previous storage setups:

March 9th, 2005 

• 4x 250G Maxtor IDE drives ( $139.00 ea. )
• 2x Promise PDC20269 Ultra 133 ATA (PCI) controller cards ( $50.00 ea. )

Raw Storage 1000G
Sub Total of $656.00

Cost per Gig $0.65

September 5th, 2007

•  Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 ST3500641AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – OEM, Price: $149.95 ea. x5

Raw Storage  2500G

Sub Total of $749.95, $804.32 total

Cost per Gig is $0.32

Current Prices

• SEAGATE 1tb ST31000340NS stat2 7200rpm 32mb (bare drive) priced $319.90

So using  the same seutp (5 1TB drives ) will give you raw storage of 5TB. Once you put that into a RAID5 you’ll be sitting pretty at 4TB. Once formatted you lose roughly 10% of your space for file tables. This will leave you at 3.6TB

Still pretty expensive, but that’s $1595.00 for 5 of these suckers, or $0.31 per gig

Prices should be dropping when more of these hit the market (and there is a demand ). But it’s still on par for price per gig.

Review of 3 terabyte drives at http://www.barefeats.com/hard94.html

Man Rides Lawn Mower to Liquor Store

(01-29) 09:49 PST Adrian, Mich. (AP) –

A man was charged with drunken driving after going through two bottles of wine, cutting through a snowstorm on his lawn mower and riding down the center of the street to reach a liquor store, authorities said.

Police found Frank Kozumplik, 49, homeward bound on a John Deere tractor Saturday night, toting four bottles of wine in a paper bag, officials said.

He told officers that his wife had taken their car to work, and that the mower was the only way he could reach the store, two miles from home.

His blood alcohol level was 2 1/2 times Michigan’s legal driving limit of 0.08 percent, police told WLEN-FM. They arrested him and confiscated the mower.

Kozumplik declined to comment Monday night.

Posted from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/01/28/national/a195200S56.DTL

Where are these things!?

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/01/26/sahib.ca.marijuana.vending.kcal