Technical > PC Hardware Discussion/Reviews > Hardware I should have bought years ago

Hardware I should have bought years ago

I guess I feel the same way about my Windows Home Server. It currently has 14TB of storage with room to add more. I also have an off sight server too. I never knew how indispensable it was until I started using it.

reply to Mango
I feel this way most about my Android phone but, with computer hardware, the latest thing really is my SSD. It's not that I couldn't live without it... it's just like putting on a new pair of glasses. Everything is just better!
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reply to Mango
I think I should buy an iscsi array
actually haven't yet but I think I should

reply to Mango
There isn't much on my PC's now that existed years ago, at least not in the way it does now.

Recent changes SSD for the most part, but SSD wasn't around many years ago, at least not in their current form.
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"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

reply to Mango
A network manageable PDU.

reply to Mango
I guess I could give "SSD" storage honorable mention here too.

reply to Mango
Another vote for a NAS, installed one last year and it makes backups and sharing of media amongst the many devices in my house an absolute breeze.

NefCanuck

reply to Mango
I kinda have stuff that i am happy i didnt get years ago. As in i skip it.
1. Tape drive
2. Those iomega zip drive
3. Mini disc

Not sure on blu ray drives maybe in the next couple of months.

I had a Syquest Sparq 1GB (Removable Cartridge) drive and I kind of regret that. It eventually failed when Syquest was going out of business so adequate resolution was difficult.

I still have one of those, that and the 1.5Gb version. Also have a couple other magneto-optical drives (one was 5GB!), and still have a parallel port CD-RW sitting around somewhere.

reply to Mango
Not sure about years ago but having an SSD in my laptop is a dream come true.

Beyond the performance which is amazing I no longer worry about bumps and rattles killing my laptop's storage. The 500gb that came in my latitude lasted less than a year of the before it started acting up which included 'grinding' much more than usual. Now the laptop is whisper quiet and can take a beating I love it.

Upgrading my desktop from the hdd raid0 to an SSD some day will be sweet too, but nothing like the advantages it brings to laptops where the drives are slower and more likely to fail.

My Rosewill RK9000 mechanical keyboard with Cherry blue switches. The last mechanical keyboard I bought was around 20 years ago, and my girlfriend at the time made off with it...I didn't care very much. I got this one last month.

Next month I'll be after my first SSD.

reply to Mango
A Pair of wireless dish shaped antennas from meritline:

»www.meritline.com/10dbi-directio···e=fghdac

Got me through using internet for better part of a year.

I haven't had the budget to get anything fancy, I got a pair of WoP adapters for 60% off from newegg a little while ago which are working really well. I wouldn't have them normally, but the sale and I have saved up.
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reply to Mango
I'm 'saving up' to buy a SSD (& RAM) for the painfully slow netbook, and an entry level NAS.

EDIT: Another one would be my PS3 for streaming as well.

I think saving up for an SSD is a worthy effort.

reply to Mango
I don't think the post title elicits the responses you are looking for. After all, if it is years-old computer hardware, it is not likely to be "essential" if you waited until today to buy it. Based on that assumption ...

Hardware that really made a difference for me was my 10+10 Bernoulli Box that I added to my IBM PC XT many years ago. At the time, I was working on an "integrated" application that predicted radionuclide ratios in waste based on the ratios on certain fission products in reactor coolant. A friend had told me about what I think was the first true "office suite" (Innovation Software's Smartware) and it supported virtual memory and 8087s. Only problem was that there was not enough room on the XT's 10 MB disk for everything. The BB 10+10 tripled my storage and allowed me to make most of the XT's hard drive available for paging.

Without Smartware and the BBox, I would never been able to show my employer that the system work and shamed them into get me the hardware and software I needed at work to save them a few tens of thousands of dollars/year.

BTW, the BBox still works.

reply to Mango
I'll never forget my first VGA CRT. Going from EGA to VGA was a revolution, that was a good investment!

I suppose the best computer investment I ever made was my old TI994A. That is what got me excited about all of it...

reply to Mango
By the way Mango, I didn't know you designed clothes :P.



Saw it walking through JC Penny today.