Beginning of the End
My cable modem arrived today!
Since my current internet connection is partly paid by my former company, I used to have an incentive to stay with DSL. But my new company reimburses $50/month instead of paying directly, so I am switching over to Comcast High-Speed Internet.
At first I was worried about upload speeds since I thought they capped out at 384kbps and my DSL is currently 1.5Mb down / 768kb up and I already have trouble uploading new builds of STX to the network. But then I saw that the faster 8Mbps down had a 768kbps up. In addition it has PowerBoost™ that boosts the download rate to 16Mbps for the first 10MB of a file.
In testing I have gotten 11Mbps down and 715kbps up. This is over 7 times faster than I was getting with my DSL down and basically the same up. Most videos that I have tried to watch just start playing and stay ahead of real-time. I am a little annoyed with the TOS--no servers--but for my uses it really seems to be worthwhile.
In other cable news, I also got my Newer Technology USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter today. This is a really great device that lets you convert almost any kind of hard drive (including SATA) to a USB drive and you don’t even need a case. This allows me to finish consolidating all the information on my G5 tower from the 160GB original drive and the 250GB expansion drive onto my new 750GB Seagate.
Once that is finished, I will buy another identical drive and mirror it (RAID 1). And I will have a 0.75 TB RAID for less than a thousand dollars, only a few years after Omni paid over ten thousand for a hardware RAID with nearly the same capacity (but using 10x 100GB drives with RAID 5 and hot spares).
Got Cable?
Thursday, December 7, 2006
