“When Sea gate told me about its 18TB IronWolf3.5in hard drive, I was gripped by the Imp of the Perverse”

I’m banned from taking pictures of my work room at the moment. That’s the effect of delicate, artistic sensibilities being presented with the grim truth of what happens after almost five months of obligatory isolation – and the minor side issue of partners who don’t even want to look in there, not for a second, either in reality or on the pages of a magazine. That’s because there’s nothing like sitting at home for turning your mind to hardware purchases.

I know, everything’s in the cloud, right? Nobody ought to be wandering around with anything larger than a smartphone these days. But nobody expected to have to work from home; not in a messy, fragmented way with different rules applied with different levels of severity in different regions of the country. I heard plenty of stories from businesses around the UK telling me the biggest single reason to move from the cloud was so they could plan their network, storage and services with the maximum flexibility from resources they could scrape together.

Those options are driven by hardware. I’m increasingly hearing of the concept of “cloud repatriation”–the movement of compute back from the cloud to the premises, as servers and software both become less of a nightmare to choose, setup and control.