Nuts and Bolts

I'm in the process....the unglamorous process of upgrading my main workstation and storage solution. I say "upgrade" as if I previously had some sort of plan or system in place, but actually, it was only an extra 160Gb HDD in my desktop. And as all digital packrats and photographer know; there's never enough storage.

And so it started. In the beginning it was a quest for more storage....and since (at that point) storage meant my desktop machine where most photo editing was done, it involved that as well. It was time for that as well. It was already obsolete 4 years ago when I built it based on the AMD Athlon XP 2500+ "Barton" CPU, 512Mb of RAM and 2 160Gb/7200rpm hard drives. For me, that was a pretty nice unit. Four year and 2 MS Service Packs later, even the mid-term RAM upgrade (to 1.5Gb) wasn't enough.

My brother encouraged me to go with a simple NAS, but in the end I decided to build 2 brand new machines instead of rebuilding 1!

Ultimately, that will mean; 1 full-blown digital media "workstation" and 1 full-blown "file server" with mirrored storage drives that would give me enough room and security! Budget? As little as possible, which would eventually mean >$500 for the whole desktop rig and >$300 for the file server.

Tall order? Stay tuned and see how it was done!