Except not for me. Yet.

But surprisingly, this weekend, in the middle of being sick and babysitting a sick niece and a sick wife, I managed to get the three one terabyte drives I recently received formatted and sort of installed in my machine. The plan, and one must always have a plan, is to eventually backup my DVD collection (which is obviously huge) from physical copies in boxes to manageable .iso files on these drives. Then plug those badboys into my HTPC, and enjoy the world of tomorrow today. Relaxing on my couch (futon from the dumpster) with my ill-street-blues Harmony remote (totally worth the money) and wireless keyboard, surfing through the hundreds of thousands of hours of bonus features these dual layer DVDs have to offer.

The benefits?

1.) Once on hard drive, I can clear up about 20 cubic feet of storage space in my office’s closet, moving these archaic physical packages to the garage.

2. Easier access. Everything will be alphabetized on the drives, which is theoretically possible with hard copies. Anyone who’s had a substantial collection of media, be it games, music cds, vinyl, or dvds knows this is easier said than done. Things get put in the wrong cases, cases get put in the wrong spots, and eventually chaos rears its ugly minotaur-like head and eats the world in a dark cloud.

3. It’s totally bad-ass. I figure each DVD will take ~4.35 gigabyte. Divided by 0. Approaching infinite. Something like 200 full DVDs on a drive (albeit probably re-encoded for space concerns). Talk about a nerdversation piece at any geek party.

But the downsides…

1.) Talk about an enormous investment of time. Ripping, encoding dual layer discs to single layer sizes, rarring and creating parity files for data integrity, yada yada. Could take untold years. By that time HD-Graph technology will be here, and we’ll all be the zombie slaves of Venutians.

2.) I will kill at least one DVD-RW drive in this process. At least.

3.) I will want a 1:1 backup of each. Because that’s how I am. And that’s ridiculous.

So we’ll see. At the rate I’m going the drives might just end up sitting on my desk until these nifty new solid state drives (which a buddy has, and loves for his OS drive) eventually hit reasonable sizes, and the cycle of hoarding begins anew.

Also: I really need to buy some IDE to SATA power converters. Quite a few…

Eating: oatmeal, eggs. Coffee!