gigamatic

Ok, so I used to work in radio. I used to know every college-rock wannabe musicians who hit the airwaves. Now I don't, but I have a decent collection of music from that era of my life, and probably a good 75% of my music would've been played on the air at my old station.

Now, I work in IT. My days are spent, generally speaking, worrying about whether or not a website is pretty and/or functional, but I've also learned a lot about software and hardware. Some of which I knew before I started at the radio station.

So, when a music geek starts telling me how he built his home entertainment computer, I listen intently. Especially when the words "RAID 5" and "terabyte" enter into the conversation.

This guy built his own terabyte RAID to hold his music. And it's full. 20,000 uncompressed songs at roughly 50M (megabytes) apiece. In case your mind isnt up for math, the usual mp3 of a single song is 5M, a floppy holds 1.44M, a cd-r is around 650M, and your typical new hard drive is about 80G (gigabytes). A gigabyte is 1000 megabytes. A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. Roughly, because everything in computer math is 1024 instead of 1000.

So. It's overkill. The average joe (me) won't typically notice any difference between a 50M and a 5M file other than the space it takes up. And the cost to set up a Terabyte of storage is just annoyingly huge. He said "but it was only $1000" to which I said "do you live with your mom?" (no offense to some readers who do, in fact, live with their moms).

Lets face fact... I am not a music afficionado. I love music, I love to listen to music, but for 22 years I listened to AM, FM, and vinyl on a 30 year old Zenith stereo. And I liked it. There's something to be said for the resonating bass out of speakers encased in a big, real wood cabinet. And dust on the needle. And an intermittent pop in the circuits.

It warms my heart to listen to Christmas music on that old stereo. Or, truthfully, just about any music produced before 1985. It was part of what made that house home.

Fresh baked cinnamon rolls, candlelight, and real heat from the woodburning stove... Christmas mornings were special, even if my dad had to work.

Ugh. Even on a music post, my mind wanders.

Kids today and their $1000 wonders of technology. I was mean and pointed out that when are drives bought in batches, and one fails, the probability of another failure is high... we've had it happen here at work. So now he has to buy a backup for his 1 Terabyte of storage. HA. HAHAHAHAHA. Along with his other Terabyte RAID he's building now because he ran out of space.