Last week I just randomly felt like rewatching Suzuka, probably one of the first anime series I downloaded using bittorent as it was being subbed by Lunar anime. Took me a couple minutes to find the disc in my anime collection (not such a big problem at that point), and popped it into my laptop for viewing. After some whirring, buzzing and what could’ve been groaning (I don’t think laptops should be able to groan but that’s what it sounded like) the disc loaded up.
Considering the difficulty in just being able to browse the disc I figured it’d be best to copy the files over to the desktop and watch from there. So I right-click > copy > paste, and behold “cyclic redundancy error” (the horror!!!). I eject the disc and inspect it and as expected the thing was scratched to no return. Perhaps the rest of my anime would be subject to such a fate? So I looked through the rest of the anime I have archived and most if not all of the discs had been scratched to some degree. Rage! It was time for action! I could sit around idly and wait for my precious anime archive deteriorate as time passes.
At the earliest opportunity possible I went shopping for external harddrives. I wanted something obviously to store my collection in, but it needed to be portable and swappable. Getting a external enclosure would satisfy the swappable requirement but the drive itself would be tethered to the AC power supply, hot swappable enclosures would probably cost too much for my student budget to facilitate. So i settled on looking for 2.5″ portable hdds. I found a 500gb WD Passport Essential drive going for $245au, that worked out to be about $.50/gb which I figured was an okay deal for the convenience and peace of mind.
I approach a store attendant and proclaim, “I want to buy this drive now!”. The dude looks at me probably thinking, “easiest sale ever I’m gonna get a rockin commission on this!”. After minutes of fumbling around in the cabinet where I spotted the price tag it seemed the dude couldn’t find it, I was in a rush, my anime was disappearing with every precious second that passed! I told him I’d just grab the 400gb model which was going at $225au (there was like a million of them in the cabinet). So we hop over to the checkout where he asks me if I wanted extended warranty for an extra $30 (pssht no, if this thing broke down in after the manufacturer’s 3yr warranty I’ll get me a 1tb drive or whatever) which I promptly reject. Given the lag the dude gives me a discount knocking down the price to $157au. Score!
So I rush home and I get this thing hooked up, format it cause the included WD stuff looks like crap and name is ‘Aura’ from .hack. And I get to copying and pasting all my dvds to this drive. The process takes days. I end up redownloading 6.5gb of anime to fill out the missing episodes lost from CRC errors. I’m still not done transferring all the anime over to Aura but it sure is satisfying knowing I can bring the collection with me more easily now. Though, it seems Aura might get filled up leaving some more series on Mako (my laptop). Looks like I need to save up more dosh to buy ‘Eden’ (what I’m gonna name the next portable hdd).
Do checkout my anime collection. I’ve got a spreadsheet with all my anime data up online at http://neoevo.net/collection which I keep up to date as I download more and more.
Now then, I’m going to go watch Suzuka like I had planned to so many days ago.
shopping and anime
Last week I just randomly felt like rewatching Suzuka, probably one of the first anime series I downloaded using bittorent as it was being subbed by Lunar anime. Took me a couple minutes to find the disc in my anime collection (not such a big problem at that point), and popped it into my laptop for viewing. After some whirring, buzzing and what could’ve been groaning (I don’t think laptops should be able to groan but that’s what it sounded like) the disc loaded up.
Considering the difficulty in just being able to browse the disc I figured it’d be best to copy the files over to the desktop and watch from there. So I right-click > copy > paste, and behold “cyclic redundancy error” (the horror!!!). I eject the disc and inspect it and as expected the thing was scratched to no return. Perhaps the rest of my anime would be subject to such a fate? So I looked through the rest of the anime I have archived and most if not all of the discs had been scratched to some degree. Rage! It was time for action! I could sit around idly and wait for my precious anime archive deteriorate as time passes.
At the earliest opportunity possible I went shopping for external harddrives. I wanted something obviously to store my collection in, but it needed to be portable and swappable. Getting a external enclosure would satisfy the swappable requirement but the drive itself would be tethered to the AC power supply, hot swappable enclosures would probably cost too much for my student budget to facilitate. So i settled on looking for 2.5″ portable hdds. I found a 500gb WD Passport Essential drive going for $245au, that worked out to be about $.50/gb which I figured was an okay deal for the convenience and peace of mind.
I approach a store attendant and proclaim, “I want to buy this drive now!”. The dude looks at me probably thinking, “easiest sale ever I’m gonna get a rockin commission on this!”. After minutes of fumbling around in the cabinet where I spotted the price tag it seemed the dude couldn’t find it, I was in a rush, my anime was disappearing with every precious second that passed! I told him I’d just grab the 400gb model which was going at $225au (there was like a million of them in the cabinet). So we hop over to the checkout where he asks me if I wanted extended warranty for an extra $30 (pssht no, if this thing broke down in after the manufacturer’s 3yr warranty I’ll get me a 1tb drive or whatever) which I promptly reject. Given the lag the dude gives me a discount knocking down the price to $157au. Score!
So I rush home and I get this thing hooked up, format it cause the included WD stuff looks like crap and name is ‘Aura’ from .hack. And I get to copying and pasting all my dvds to this drive. The process takes days. I end up redownloading 6.5gb of anime to fill out the missing episodes lost from CRC errors. I’m still not done transferring all the anime over to Aura but it sure is satisfying knowing I can bring the collection with me more easily now. Though, it seems Aura might get filled up leaving some more series on Mako (my laptop). Looks like I need to save up more dosh to buy ‘Eden’ (what I’m gonna name the next portable hdd).
Do checkout my anime collection. I’ve got a spreadsheet with all my anime data up online at http://neoevo.net/collection which I keep up to date as I download more and more.
Now then, I’m going to go watch Suzuka like I had planned to so many days ago.