I mentioned that I had bought a new external hard drive.

Within days, it failed.

I went into eBay which is where I bough the drive to contact the vendor, and to my disgust I noticed that he had a no-returns policy.  More in hope than expectation, I wrote to him anyway.

I didn’t get a reply, so I marked the failure down to experience, and as I needed a backup drive, I ordered a new drive off a different vendor.

A day later, I got two mails.  One was from the new vendor to say that my drive had been dispatched, and the other was from the original vendor to say that he would replace any faulty components, which he proceeded to do.

I now have two new external drives, and one somewhat flaky old one,  I have just hooked them all up to this laptop.  It now has a total of 4.8 Terrabytes of storage!

I remember back in the 90s when Microsoft introduced their Terraserver project (now apparently renamed MSR Maps) which was a precursor to Google Earth.  Everyone was aghast at the amount of storage required to host the project.  How could anything be so big as to require terrabytes of storage?  yet I could probably store the whole project on my laptop now!

Naturally, I am not going to lug the drives around with the laptop.  What I intend to do is to mount them on the network so they are accessible at all times without having to physically move them. 

As for the amount of space I now have, I would imagine that it is about right.  I will mirror the two 2Tb drives so that in the event of failure, I will still have a backup.  The 1Tb drive will be used as an auxiliary dump which I shall probably use as a media server.

Overall, I should have enough storage?