TO SERVER OR NOT TO SERVER — A SHEDDIE’S GUIDE TO THE DATA GALAXY

PART 3

“By the end of this article I hope to have a definitive and unequivocal ‘yes and no”’

Recycling old tech is about pros and cons, and in the case of our attempt to breathe life back into a 15-year-old G5 Mac and various external hard drives of similar vintage, we’ve come down on the side of the cons. Sadly, I might add. Back in 1965 Gordon E. Moore — a co-founder of microchip manufacturer Intel — predicted a rate of change in the world of chip manufacture by stating that the number of transistors required for each chip would double every two years. At the time he envisaged a 10-year projection for what has now become known as Moore’s Law, still consistent almost 60 years later. Applying Moore’s Law to our project, our tech has iterated through it eight times. Or to put it another way, that’s a geometric progression of 128. Which makes me wonder, has this project been about the noble ideal of minimising landfill, or about the troubled ability to let go due to the time and memories it represents? Some pop-psychology to reflect on.

Project drivers

The Raspberry Pi NAS (Network Attached Storage) device that Lance Hastie of Com Technology designed and implemented for me is achieving more