A Little Fabrication

What to do with a NAS that has a few unused millimeters of space? Heck yeah, fill it with another drive! Ok, for those who know, I have a little storage space for the home network. The device had a spot that was slightly larger than a 3.5" hard drive. So, I fabricated a couple brackets, purchased some right-angle cables on Ebay and proceeded to disassemble just enough of the device to squeeze the drive in upside-down. I would have finished up even faster if the developers of Fedora Linux or the EMC build weren't jerks and had to made a simple Samba mount a HUGE PITA. At first, I thought my Linux skills were just average but after seeing a friend of mine who's a Linux ninja stumped I felt a tiny bit better about myself. In the end, we did some hacking of the config files, accepted the ridiculously long mount name and moved on with life. The drive's mounted but it's not pretty.

So, what did I win for all this pain? An extra 2TB of storage, of course. At about 16GB for a 1 hour TV show in HD that'll fill up surprisingly quickly. It's still amazing to consider that I'll likely fill this drive in the fall because only a few years ago I remember spending almost $200 on a 80GB hard drive and swore I'd never fill it up. I may be chatting a few years from now laughing about how 2TB was a "huge" amount of data as I fill my 3 petabyte solid state drive.