Thanks to iiNet's latest round of quota increases (read: buying capacity on PPC-1 made us drop our pants data is so cheap now), quota is now a problem again.

Being able to consume 600GB/mo of traffic opens the doors to all kind of silliness that one might not have previously thought practical. And as such, I've found that we once again have the need to schedule our downloads so we don't blow our quota during the peak/offpeak periods:

An hours worth of work with PERL and the iiNet Usage XML API, and the SabNZBD API, I have a tool which updates the download rate of my usenet weirdness.

Instead of a basic schedule which doesn't provide any guarantees your overall usage will be below schedule, this one takes into account your quota, offpeak/onpeak times and remaining data for the month - and sets SabNZBD to throttle so you'll end up hitting your target quota usage perfectly, no matter what everyone else in the household does.

Throw in some other nice bits like upper boundaries (eg: keep 250kB/s free for other traffic), etc - and this script should go down a treat. There are only two features left to implement:

• Better 'buffer-zone' support: Currently the script will target a safe 'buffer' zone, that is - you can tell it you always want 20gb free for other use. The script should back-off the buffer (logarithmic?) at the end of the month to more efficiently use the bandwidth.

• Link Speed awareness: The script uses a hardcoded link size to use for bandwidth reservation. Whilst this is really best implemented with QoS at the border, it's still a nice feature to have - and maybe it should scrape the current link speed from the modem.

In related news, I'm out of storage space. Time to up the ante on the storage project. I've had my Norco 4220 chassis sitting here for about two months waiting for me to buy an X58-based mainboard and Core i7 CPU, as well as some nice fresh new drives to sit on my LSI disk controllers. Which brings me to my final point - I'm not normal. Normal people don't do this kind of thing. Normal people turn on the TV and watch Neighbours.

But you know what? Not being normal rocks.

Western Digital's 2TB hard drive comes out in February this year, and it looks like storage density is continuing in it's trend of awesomeness.

So much so that even at a price of AUD$419 per disk at release (versus $159 for a 1TB in the same series), storage is now reaching the density that I'd consider using an off-the-shelf NAS storage solution again.

Historically, I've been quite keen on the Thecus N5200BR Pro - however it's price point has been rather high - about $1300 to look after 5 disks (which back in the day was 4TB usable).

Now it seems that Thecus have revealed two awesome new products: a seven disk chassis upgrade, the Thecus N7700, and an eight disk rack-mountable variation, the Thecus N8800.

What's really impressive is that the seven disk N7700 is available for a mere $200 more than the N5200BR Pro, which combined with the higher disk densities coming out and good pricing - means I'm now siding on the home NAS solution again.

Which ultimately makes me sad, because when I combine it with the storage I want for my workstation (300GB Velociraptor), I'd like to be spending approximately $4000 on storage this year - something I can't afford in the slightest.

Sigh :(