In my college apartment, back when my roommate and I had a collection of (Gasp!) two computers and an Xbox 360, we had the beginnings of a respectable home network. In actuality, this consisted of a single router and a discreet hole punched in the wall between our rooms to allow for an Ethernet run. But it was a wired home network, dammit!
One evening, probably after imbibing too much, we had a discussion about stress-testing the network, for no other reason beyond idle curiosity. And so, we each began a bandwidth test on our computers, while simultaneously transferring a large file between them, and playing an Xbox game. In actuality, this didn’t represent much of a stress test, but it was sufficient to fry the router–a Linksys WRT-something.
The router was my roommate’s, and since he already had it at the time, I felt no need to purchase something better. After the test though, I went to a different brand: D-Link, with whom I’ve stayed since, at least until I have a bad experience. In any case, this utterly pointless test broke an expensive electronic and forced us to be offline for a couple days. What was the lesson? NOT A DAMN THING!
Fast-forward to present. I acquired a 5 terabyte USB HDD, at the time intended as a master backup drive. I encrypted the drive, then manually copied over every file from every computer we owned. I then locked this drive in my desk at work. Clumsily, I had created an off-site data backup. But the process was cumbersome and time-consuming, and the encryption didn’t play nice cross-platform. So when Amazon started offering unlimited cloud storage for a fixed yearly rate, and I found out my NAS could integrate with it and maintain client-side encryption, I really couldn’t think of a reason to continue with the arduous task of manual backups.
But now, I had an unused giant hard drive. What to do with it? My Xbox One, always suffering from a critical shortage of storage, won the prize. I connected the drive, followed the formatting prompts, and subsequently solved all my storage problems for the foreseeable future.
In fact, it was so much storage that I decided to download every free game offering that came with my Xbox Live Gold subscription. Generally, they’re mediocre games that neither I (nor anyone) will ever play. But, I can. So now, every month, I download these games simply because it’s there!
–Simon