February 2006 Entries
Well, it was bound to happen.....I ran out of disk space.
A lossless music library quickly eats it all up. I'm at over 200Gb now and it won't take long for it to surpass 250Gb which is the size of my largest hard disk. It's not cost effective to buy hard disks over 300Gb so I figure it's time to go with RAID 5 for storage.
A basic RAID 5 system really needs at least 4 disks. Although RAID 5 gives you fault tolerance, it's still not a substitute for backing up so I need another disk to backup important files. If the...
Here's another Netgear product I recently purchased: the GS105 Gigabit Ethernet Switch. I liked the solid metal case and the fact that it supports jumbo ethernet frames. It's a simple product and just works.
I'm not running at gigabit ethernet speeds yet but my plan is to get there in the near future. I've replaced my homemade Cat5 cables with Belkin Cat6 cables as another step along the way.
I read recently that they're working on a Cat7 cable specification which will allow speeds up to 10 gigabits. Nice! But that does mean the upgrades will continue...
I bought the Netgear PS121 of these a couple of months ago in an effort to make our USB printer work as a standalone printer connected directly to our ethernet network. The printer is an Epson Stylus Photo 650.
It wasn't hard to get working but print spooling became very slow and it would leave Microsoft Word hanging after the printing was finished so I've shelved it and gone back to directly connecting the printer to a PC. The hanging issue is probably something to do with Word as other apps worked ok.