Thursday I got so fed up with shuffling files around on my hard drives that I bought a 1TB external hard drive. The main reason why I needed more storage space is my music collection. Up until some months ago it fitted nicely on a 80GB drive, but lately, well, let’s just say that even with deleting stuff like crappy bootlegs space was getting slim.
The main issue I had to iron out was how to gain maximum compatibility between Windows and Linux, as I run Ubuntu on my laptop and may one day decide to ditch Windows altogether. (#69) After some reading, the suggestion of making a main ext3 partition and a smaller, plain old FAT32 partition made most sense to me. Just install a ext3 driver for Windows and put that on the FAT32 bit for when you need to take the drive with you. After I formatted the drive it turned out I had to format it once again: apparently the gparted utility in Ubuntu 9.04 doesn’t let you set the inode size, so I had to invoke some command line magic (mkfs.ext3 -I 128).
As I’m sorta obsessive about my music, this was also a nice opportunity to reorganize the whole shebang. Most of the time it was just moving some folders around, and wait for it to happen. Sometimes it’s working my way through a ton of unsorted files. Other times it’s not knowing how to tackle some 28GB of bootlegs. And in some cases, it requires to rant about a pet peeve for a while.
For example: bonus tracks on a ‘special edition’ of an album that came out just a few months ago. Nightwish and Apocalyptica are among the prime offenders in my collection: I go out and buy their latest album, and a few months later there’s a new version with more content. Fuck that. Fuck that very much. Just release that special edition at same time as the regular one. I’m one of those types that would pay a couple of euros more for some more content. But if you try to fuck me over with a new über-edition three months later, well, screw you. You won’t get those euros. Same thing goes for all that iTunes-exclusive pre-order-only nonsense. Fuck that shit.
Anyway, I got some more sorting out to do. And when I finally figure out how to set up and maintain a file server, I can do it all again…