how much is your time worth?

Over the past few weekends, I’ve been struggling with my limited Unix knowledge to try and create a NAS box for my flat. My weapon of choice was FreeNAS, which you can download as a “Disk Utility”-ready ISO.

The intention was to boot it all off of a handy USB drive I had lying around (I seem to collect the bloody things), and voila! 140 + 180 + 40 = 360GB of simple, network-ready storage.

Those of you who have any experience at all with Linux know what happens next. I tried to boot from the USB Drive – no dice. A quick Google reveals that my nearly decade-old (how the heck did that happen?) BIOS doesn’t support USB boot. Ah well, there go 40 of my wonderful gigabytes (FreeNAS is more than happy to live on a physical drive, and even provides an option to share it with storage space. An option I was mysteriously unable to find, let alone select).

And here is where I hit the stumbling block that would ultimately prove FreeNAS’ undoing. I dutifully entered the IP address of my now-booting NAS box into Firefox. Eureka! It was all there in front of me – AFP, Samba, Groups, Users. All mine for the taking. Just format one of my drives… which rewarded with what is probably the most helpful error message in the universe.

Error – please retry

Here was my screw this point (My language at the time wasn’t nearly so charitable. My apologies to the maintainers of FreeNAS). I’d been tinkering for hours and had nothing to show for it.

So I toddled off down to Dick Smith’s and bought myself a brand new Seagate FreeAgent. $290 for 500 “glorious” gigabytes. Well, so says the packaging (I shall be returning it to the store in the event that my gigabytes are less than “glorious”).

A slight aside – these things are awesome. The first thing you see when you open the box is the instruction booklet – printed on one side with “This won’t take long”. Inside it lists how long it’ll take to get setup – all web 2.0 style (pastel colours and really big fonts). The last step has a little note – “Times may vary depending on how excited you are about your new FreeAgent”. I like it – a product with personality. I had to format it for OS X, but on the side of the box it tells me – “You’ll need to reformat using Disk Utility”. I wonder how happy I would have been with that had it not asked so nicely?

So, I essentially traded $290 for a few (admittedly potentially frustrating) hours of my time. Which makes me wonder – how much time could I save by making that exchange more often? The canonical example is mowing the lawn, but I sure as hell wouldn’t mind paying someone to do the dishes, or my washing even…

By the same token, do we really want to start tallying up the totals for everything we do? Do I really want to know how much that new episode of Heroes cost me? Or how much I could have saved by eating out instead of cooking myself dinner? I think I’d prefer to pretend it’s not possible. Most of the time :)