I shouldn't have done it! I just knew it was stupid when I built it that way! I thought, "it's worth a try" and, "if I've got it, I might as well use it." I thought it might be, well, kinda cool.

I realise now, I'm an idiot. I realise that I should've listened to my own reason, my own arguments less than a year before. "It's a waste of time and money" I told people. "When it breaks, you'll be sorry" I said, with the smugness that only the truly conservative can ever muster.  But of course I wasn't conservative, I was a student and broke. I was pea green with envy. I wanted it!

I'm talking about R.A.I.D.. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. I wanted to be one of those people who could virtually strut around the overclocking sites of the intarweb and say, "yeah my rig's packing a RAID" and virtually stand their with my virtual hands on my virtual hip chewing virtual gum with a virtual matchstick hanging from my virtual lips. I didn't want to be a (l)user. I didn't want to be "just a little nerdy". I wanted to be a Geek!

Of course, now I know the truth. All these people with the swagger and the strut are liars. They're not living on the bleeding edge of hardware. They either don't do any of it at all, or they keep Really Good Backups. I didn't. Five years of my digital life reduced to a paperweight in less time than it took for me to notice a blue flash and a smokey smell. I know now that R.A.I.D. really stands for, Rapidly Annihilates Irreplacable Data.