The hard-drive fairy just showed up at my office, and I'm not out of disk space anymore. A friend's company was selling 600 160GB drives for $50 each, along with a few RAID cards and a few other odds and ends. I picked up 4 160 GB drives and a 3ware 7810 for cheap. Once I get home, that should give me around 450 GB of RAID 5 space. Since my biggest box at home right now has mirrored 60GB drives, this should be a nice step up :-). I'm going to replace the mirrored drives with the RAID set, and then move the smaller drives to other boxes that need the space.

I'm not quite sure what I'll do with 1/2 TB of space at home, but it shouldn't be too hard to fill up. I have around 40 GB of images from my D60 that I'm been archiving off to DVD, plus another pile of mail and other assorted data. I need to start backing my laptop up; I'm getting deeply afraid of it dying, and disks are far and away the cheapest (and fastest!) way to perform short-term backups.

I'm also thinking about ripping most of my DVD collection and throwing it onto the drives, and then putting the xbox media player on the xbox downstairs :-). Unless I'm mis-reading things, that should do video-on-demand quite nicely. Of course, I'll probably have to add another xbox upstairs once that starts working, but that's the price of progress.

Now if I could just find a decent guide to xbox modding. I mean, I can figure out how to get Linux on the xbox without a hardware modchip, and I can figure out how to get the XBMP on the box with a modchip, but it's completely unclear if I can combine the two, and I don't really want to lose an entire weekend to this little project.