LabRats #005: Not enough space? Add another hard drive!
It’s the programmers who are guilty of it! The more applications they write, the more applications we need, and the more applications we need, the more space we need on our hard drives, and – to add insult to injury – today’s programmers aren’t known exactly as space savers, either. Where it would have taken a dozen lines of code in the early days of computing, a programmer today considers it a matter of professional pride to get the same result writing a hundred lines.
That aside, we simply have to keep having more and more of stronger and stronger applications. Short of buying a new computer whenever the old one can’t take it any longer, we can get ourselves a new hard drive. In fact, we can get ourselves new hard drives.
Where it used to be a major surgery – a quintuple heart bypass combined with trepanation of the skull – to add a new hard drive to an existing one, it’s now just a pure plug-and-play proposition, with only a few caveats thrown in.
The chief one among them? It’s no longer a master and a slave driver. Politically incorrect, you see. The words “primary” and “secondary” will have to suffice.