Work on home server greenblatt: time for less disks with more storage. So I bought two sata disks, one huge one to store the camera archive and scratch files, and one for the system and home directories. The choice for two disks is so the one with the camera archive and the scratch files can fall asleep when not in use, to save a bit of power. Installing both new disks at once wasn't going to happen due to space and cabling considerations so I started with the big one. When that one is done I can remove three pata disks from the system. I also updated the system bios to the latest version which made the system clock a lot more stable, ntpd now runs without having to use tickadj. Bios updates are easy these days: this bios can update itself from a USB stick. I chose logical volume management (lvm2) again for managing the big disks so it will be easy to expand storage when needed without getting a big tree of filesystem mounts.