So a few weeks back, a buddy of ours received notice from a friend that Dell had an incredible deal on their website: $160 off a 500GB external hard drive. Price after rebate: $80. Yes, 500GB for 80 fricken dollars. Well, it suffices to say we ordered a bunch. I bought two for myself, expecting to be able to extract the drives from their chassises (can you even make that world a plural?) and stick them in my MythTV Backend. Of course, most of us figured it was a pricing error on their website and the orders would be cancelled or the price amended and a correction issued to we, the customers. A suspicion confirmed when we discovered, later in the day, that the discount had been reduced to a mere $60 (if I recall), and another hard drive, far more expensive than the one we ordered, now tagged with the $160 price cut.

Anyway, fast-forward a couple weeks, and lo and behold, much to our surprise, the drives start showing up! Pretty nice ones, too. Snazzy aluminum case, nice little stand, the whole works. And today, mine arrived! So this evening, I extracted the drives from their cases (turns out they were Deskstars in a straight-up USB HD enclosure) and installed them in my backend. Voila! Another 500GB (they’re set up in a mirror), or 206 hours of recording time, available for our enjoyment! Great success!

Oh, and Jen, if you find this boring… piss off! ;)