I bought myself one terrabyte of new storage last week from eBuyer, as well as an extra fan to cool the disks

I ran into a couple of problems, the primary one being that I can’t use the built-in RAID controller on my motherboard, as it’s only SATA1, not SATA2, which is twice the speed. The drives do work on SATA1, but that defeats the purpose of buying fast drives! So I’m left with some left-over drives, as I can only plug in 4 at a time.

As it happens one of the four new drives has a big problem. Windows installed onto it very slowly, and it had issues… The PC would just freeze doing pretty much anything. So I’ve arranged to RMA it for a refund from eBuyer

But everything is fine now - I have a 200GB partition for Windows, my profile folder and programs, and a 30GB partition for Linux (and a 2GB swap partition for Linux too). Another 250GB drive for downloads, and the last one for Games. My other 250GB drive has my music and some old backups on it.

The next motherboard I buy will have at least 8 SATA2 (or better, if SATA3/4/5… is out by then!) ports, as well as at least 4 SATA2+ ports on a RAID controller to allow for future expansion

So the grand total of storage capacity I have here, and in my colocated server, comes to about 2.5TB*

* It would be more, but my 300GB Maxtor Onetouch died recently.

You may have seen on my Flickr pages that I built a new rackmount server. Well I sent it off on Friday last week to the Redbus Meridian Datacenter in Docklands, London, and it was installed yesterday evening.

I’ve moved Fr3d.org and the L33TSig service to the new server, so they should be a lot faster for everyone now - I’ve certainly noticed a big difference so far!

- Fr3d

I’ve bought myself a new phone!

Well… I got it on contract, but hey, same thing :P

It’s the new Sony Ericsson K800i, complete with 3.2 MegaPixel camera, Bluetooth, Video Calls and everything else you’d expect from a high-end phone

So far I’m very impressed with it - very easy to use and setup. The PC software works well for transferring files, and the synchronisation application is neat too

The camera takes great photos, and the flash is pretty useful too - it also has an orange/red light that comes on while focusing to help reduce any red-eye in your photos. There is a built-in mp3 player, which can play through the hands-free kit or through the on-board speaker - the speaker sounds pretty decent, considering how small it is.

If you’re having a hard time choosing phones, or can’t chose between this one and another one, you can’t go wrong getting this one. I may have only had it a few hours so far, but it’s hugely impressed me so far, and I doubt it will fail to impress you either!

Edit: I’ve taken some photos of it, view them on my Flickr page. I also took a few comparison shots showing how small the new Sony M2 memory card is compared to a normal SD card - these are also on my Flickr page

- Fr3d

This is a photo I took a few days ago - I just thought I’d post it on here too

I’m using a modified version as my current desktop background/wallpaper too.

There are a few more macro/close-up photos on my Flickr pages, as well as some other random photos on there, so feel free to browse through them.