Well I did something this weekend that I haven’t done in almost 4 years…. and that is build a computer. It all started last week when a colleague at work offered an incredible deal on 4x 500GB enterprise class hard drives for only $120. It was the kind of don’t ask where they came from type offer. My plan: to use an old computer in my closet and get FreeNAS installed. On Thursday night I bought a PCI based SATA controller at Fry’s with 2 ports on it as the motherboard already had two and this is where my crazyness started. The cheapo card would bring FreeNAS, a FreeBSD based NAS solution, to a screeching halt. At this point I had 3 options:

1. Get SATA to PATA converters so two of my drives are seen as PATA drives ($50)
2. Attempt to find a decent PCI 32bit / 33Mhz card ($180)
3. Use my current PC as NAS and build a new computer as its 4 years old and needs replacing ($500)

You can only imagine what I did. I chose #3. My PC was getting 4 years old and I definitely noticed when I tried to play the first computer game in a year about 3 months ago on it (Command & Conquer 3). Not a good thing for a computer nerd. Plus the idea is that this PC will last me at least another 4 years. I thought the craziness ended there until I went to Costco and saw a Samsung 216BW on display for $259.99. Somehow that ended up in my giant cart.

Thank god Christmas is still 2 months away so I can recover from this :-).

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 8:59 am and is filed under life, tech related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.