Boundaries of Space

I have previously mentioned an external drive I have for my files. I use this disk as a mass storage for client files as well as my music (Don't Steal Music!).

This drive is only 160 GB, and once formatted it goes down to somewhere around 149 because of the space taken by allocation tables and all that good stuff that happens behind the scenes.

I am currently running out of space. And I have given thought of getting a bigger drive, but I believe that if I had just any external drive I'd not be making the most out of my storage, so I've decided to get a NAS. For those of you new to storage NAS or Network Attached Storage allows for disk space shared in a network environment. Unlike a regular external disk unit, several machines can have simultaneous access without bogging down the host machine. It is in fact it's own host machine and when you're working collaboratively this can be an advantage.

Now there are several places where you can get a prefab NAS or you can build your own. I have a spare motherboard with a cpu and memory so I'm taking this route.

If youdon't have the parts, following the previously linked guide can set you back anywhere from $200 to $500 USD, depending on how much storage you want (you can reach 1 TB easy with around $420 by looking around pricewatch.com . Just go over and check out their Hard Drive section and you'll see what I mean.

If you have storage needs and you have the little extra cash around, I recommend you go for it. I for one will tell you that if you build a wireless NAS you'll be set for the long haul.

Adventures in Filesystem Formatting

Just this past week my Windows XP install crashed, mainly due to my changing hardware and not reinstalling (hey I stretched it for 5 months!).

So fast forward to last thursday and guess what? Windows wouldn't start. So I figured I'd do a quick format and reinstall windows. Things didn't quite go as I planned but I'll leave thattravesty for another time.

I own an external 160GB hard drive which I connect to my computr via Firewire. Since I use that drive to move large files and my music library around I must stick to filesystem which can be mounted on machines running many flavours of OSes.

My pick, for the most part has been FAT32.

Before you start detailing superiority details of yoru favourite filesystem, please note that while most modern filesystems are superior to FAT, few have readily available drivers or kernel extensions for other OSes, so taking this into consideration and the fact that most OSes format to FAT it's a simple choice.

However you'd expect that the platform that spawned FAT would not cripple it's own offering and try and force you to a more closed alternative, and that's exactly what windows does.

Theoretically, FAT32 can support partitions up to 2 Terabytes in size, yet the format tool in windows only allows you to format up to 32 GB and if you need to go higher it almost forces you to go the NTFS way which can only be read but not written to in most other systems.

I found a command prompt tool that did the jo, however, and I'd like to share with you all that with a tool you can get here I was able to format my large drive to something many machines can use.

I really hate crippled software.