Technology is an investment. You spend a couple hours learning how to do something new, and hope this new piece of technology will save you time in the long run, or provide you with some cool new widget that is worth the time you put in. But with every investment, there is a break-even point where the return on the project isn’t worth the time and money put into it. For most people, this break-even point is fairly low. The potential return isn’t worth “the hassle.” Some people are able to see the long term investment potential. Their threshold for technology hassle is much higher than other people. We call these people “nerds.”
I may have reached my break-even point. The time and money I have been investing in these projects, specifically FreeNAS, are not worth the potential payoff. FreeNAS has continued to frustrate me, and I feel that only by spending huge amounts of time learning the underlying technologies will I be able to get it to do what I want. My FreeNAS project is just an example of my recent technology frustrations. Tonight I found out Windows didn’t want to recognize the file system on a hard drive. So if I want all 460 gigabytes of data, I will have to recover it all using shady data recovery tools, something I have only painful experiences with. In response to what I considered poor planning and engineering on Microsoft’s part, I proclaimed that I would immediatly switch to Ubuntu, using XP only for gaming. At the time, this sounded good, but my experience with Ubuntu has also been frustrating.
I guess I’m at the point where learning new technologies might not be worth it, unless I’m getting paid for it. I’m taking a serious look at it. I might just need a break to evaulate what my goals should be, and I might be right back at it soon enough. But maybe in a couple weeks I’ll be looking to sell some equipment.
http://www.drobo.com/
Seems like a good plug-and-play solution