Patience Will Win The Day

It's not the most popular of positions, but my stance on doing things technology-wise is to be patient and plan. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't do anything "spur of the moment". Buying that Minolta Rokkor-X 50mm lens is a good example. But really, even that thing is part of a greater picture of something I've been wanting to do for some time, but waited till the opportune moment.

I guess you could characterize me as a pouncing cat, waiting for it's prey. Lucky for me, that didn't equate to be an errant rabbit or squirrel!

Not too long ago, I wrote about finding a Drobo Mini at an excellent price. However, not only was the price good, but this one was pre-populated with 4 Western Digital 320Gb drives and a 256Gb Crucial M4 mSATA SSD. This item actually created an entire series of sub-moves within the original deal. Although, I have yet to sell off those 4 drives which I think are too small, but the SSD has already been installed into my ThinkPad X1, upgrading it from a 160Gb Intel 320. It also frees up the 2.5" drive bay for me to put in a 7mm drive for purely storage purposes. I've also put in some of my random stack of SATA drives in that Mini to both upgrade it's storage (one of the replacements is a 500Gb), but that frees up the WD 320Gb for sale. My plan was to slowly replace the installed drives (3 320Gb, 1 500Gb) with 1Tb Hitachi drives which I think are the best combination of price and reliability. Note the WAS.....

Then this happened. You've probably noted that the label on this drive is a little odd. Basically, all the current high capacity (1.5Tb & 2Tb) 2.5" drives have a little bulge on their covers. This necessitates that the label have a cut-out to accommodate it. This trend started with the 1.5Tb drives of which, this is one, then on to the current king of capacity, the 2Tb Samsung/Seagate drives. Well....actually, that's not completely accurate, in that most of the 1.5Tb drives which are 12.5mm in thickness don't have to have the bulge; only the ones that conform to the standard 9mm drive height. In fact, it's a bit more complex than that: there are 3 drive heights for the 2.5" (often called laptop) drives. The 9mm being the most common and therefore considered "standard", the 7mm as extra-thin (which perversely is "standard" for SSDs), and the 12.5mm which are considered non-standard as very few notebook computers have a drive bay that will accommodated a drive of that thickness. Generally, these are made to go into those external "portable" external drives that you see out there. If you see one that's 1.5-2Tb in capacity (and it's not a Seagate or Samsung), then chances are good that it's of that thickness. So there!

Why am I going on and on about this minutia regarding 2.5" drives, you ask? Well, these little bits of information mean something and can impact your purchasing decisions. Obviously, I'd like to outfit my Drobo Mini with as big of drives as I can for as little money as possible. Also, you throw in there, my little personal bias against using Seagate drives as a rule. This leaves out the current capacity champ of 2Tb. But, what about the 1.5Tb non-Seagate drives on the market? Well..... the majority of them are like the Toshiba you see above; 750Gb at the standard thickness, and 12.5mm (which does not fit the Drobo Mini) at the 1.5Tb capacity! The only exception being the VERY difficult to find Hitachi Travelstar 5K1500. I had resigned myself to using the 1Tb Hitachi which are common and can typically be found at about $50 a-pop, when my routine of checking ads bore fruit!. On Thursday, I came across an eBay listing for a Hitachi, 3.5" "Desktop". I wasn't very surprised by this since I actually have 2 of those things in my main workstation, but I decided to open the link anyway and look at it. Yes, the description was for the 3.5" "DeskStar", but the photos were of the 2.5" TravelStar! So I messaged the seller immediately and when he replied that the description was wrong, but the photos were right; I bought the thing at the $45 after-shipping price IMMEDIATELY!!!

So yeah...... this is what I was doing..... inside that is, since it'd have been a little weird for me to do this at work!