Pack Up My Belongings, I've Got To Get Away

 So about 20 years ago, I was trying to get things figured out for moving.  I was going to a place where I didn't have a great deal of personal space to work with and no internet access in any way, shape or form.  It was also almost an hour away from where I worked, so things were weird there too.

I only spent about a week living there before I packed up my stuff, again, and came back somewhere closer.

I'm entertained to note that the computer I was attempting to put together at the time, for the reason I was trying to put it together, wasn't easily done in those days, but now it is a way of life. Especially for me.

My aim was to downsize a desktop to a laptop footprint and use a USB hard drive as a permanent, high-speed storage addition. In those days, anything that I could get my hands on would not have come with a reasonable number of USB ports, and USB 2.0 was a maybe.  External hard drive? Hah!

I did end up building one out of a USB CD-ROM enclosure at some point shortly thereafter. It looked like a mess, but it did the job well enough.

I did eventually get a laptop for pretty cheap that could run what I needed it to run, but by then I was a little more established with life.

These days I have a few things going on that weren't a thing previously.

I spent several years running my home network data off an old Dell rack server (Which I don't appear to have ever mentioned anywhere here), and an HP network switch that were given to me.  I had to do a little updating on the server to get everything set up the way I wanted to, but it worked.  

Here is where things get relevant:

Once I moved into a smaller house, that didn't have someplace I could run a giant server and switch, I had to figure something else out.

I am now running everything that was previously on the server, which ONLY (I know, I know) ~6TB of storage space to a 8TB USB hard drive plugged into my primary desktop PC.

I could, however, run it off a laptop these days, because they are now powerful enough to stream high quality video and audio in the background and not suffer from too much in the way of performance issues.

It's crazy what twenty years can do.