I just spent about $500 in one night of reckless online shopping :) I figured since I hadn't bought myself anything for my b'day, I could use a few New Years gifts. I sure hope everything arrives in a week or two. First of all, I bought 4, and yes I said FOUR Seagate Barracuda 120 GB hard drives for about $283. That's less than 60 cents per raw GB! I remember in 1998, I paid over $200 for just TWO GBs! I sure hope CDW honors this awesome deal. So I'll use these four 120GB hard drives and create a RAID 5 setup that will give me about 360GB of space using RocketRaid 1640 Serial ATA controller that cost me $90. RAID is basically a system of connecting two or more hard drives in such a way that if one of them fails, the others can recreate the data on the failed hard drive and thus manage to recover all your lost data. The cost is of course that 1/4th of the space used for backups. RAID also stores parts of each file into multiple hard drives at the same time, so that when you read the file back, it actually reads from multiple drives, which is obviously faster. Kind of like having more lanes on a highway - it's expensive, but works great. So now RAID 5 will combine these 4 hard drives and give me one big hard drive of approximately 360GB that will protect my data no matter what :) Plus it'll be two-to-three times faster than each of the drives individually.

Next, I bought a $1 microphone because I have no idea where my old one is and on top of that bought this gorgeous A4Tech RP-649 wireless optical mouse for only $33. This mouse has two scroll wheels, five configurable buttons, works from a distance of 5-6 feet, comes with 4 recharable batteries, AND includes a two-battery recharger! That's a LOT for the price. And finally, I bought a pair of Sennheiser HDC451 noise-cancellation headphones. Sennheiser makes one of the best speaker-systems & headphones. These headphones are normally priced at $150 but they were only $70 on Amazon! Noise-cancellation means just that - once I wear these headphones and turn them on, they basically cancel almost all of the surrounding noise :) So I can sit in the noisy buses, turn these on, and listen to my music as if the whole world is quiet and peaceful :)

So let's see: $284 HDD + $90 RAID + $1 Mic + $33 Mouse + $70 Headphones + $16 Shipping/Tax = $494. I think these are enough gadgets for me for now. Hehe. Oh and I still have an Econ exam left. It's in about 7 hours, so I better go to sleep soon! I <3 my gadgets and gizmos.

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