You know, folks, we're so far out of the loop and behind on world events right now (Apple-flavored or otherwise), we're not even going to bother incorporating topical "ripped from today's headlines!" plot material into our final scene today, because what with how long it takes us to finish producing an episode given our current distraction load, by the time it'd finally get out on the airwaves, it'd be as stale as week-old sourdough doing a standup routine about the First Continental Congress. So instead, we're sure you won't mind sinking your teeth into a juicy slice o' drama that stays fresh on the shelf no matter how long you leave it up there. Yep, that's right: it's time once again for Stupid RAID Tricks!

By now you know the drill, right? A quick tech recap for those who think we're yammering on about bug spray: a RAID is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks, a volume that acts like one disk but is actually made up of a bunch of them, either "striped" for speed and capacity (so that, say, two 80 GB disks act like one 160 GB one) or "mirrored" for fault-tolerance (so two 80 GB disks act like one 80 GB disk, but if either disk dies, the RAID just shrugs and pretends that nothing happened). Unlike Windows XP, Mac OS X apparently lets you build RAIDs out of just about any volumes you can mount-- which led to that 4.22 MB floppy-based RAID some guy slapped together on his Mac last year, a technological stroke of inspired genius we still rank somewhere up there with the invention of Post-It Notes. Well, Jim Wright of Wright This Way comes darn close to achieving floppyRAID-class geekitude for describing how he built a working RAID out of four 1 GB iPod shuffles.

It was only a matter of time, we suppose; after all, the iPod shuffle lets you use any storage not claimed by music files as just another hard drive, so who wouldn't string a bunch of 'em together to create some wacky Frankensteinian RAID that costs way too much for the available storage? Certainly not ol' Jim, who bought one shufflePod himself and borrowed three others from friends, purchased a four-port USB hub, plugged everything into his G5, fired up Disk Utility, and striped those puppies together into a single 3.9 GB RAID. When he was done, he tested his handiwork by copying 1.86 GB worth of files to the RAID (which wouldn't fit on a single shufflePod-- clever, right?) in "just under 11 minutes." Success!

Okay, maybe it doesn't have quite the geek quotient of the floppy RAID, but at a cost of about $612, the shuffleRAID does probably have the distinction of being one of the most expensive 4ish GB logical volumes anyone's built out of new equipment these days. Of course, that all goes away as soon as some sick freak daisy-chains an armful of hubs and mounts 128 Celestron VistaPix Digital Camera Binoculars (each with 32 MB of Mass Storage-compliant flash RAM) to build an equivalent RAID to the tune of about, oh, $18,000. What are you waiting for? Get crackin'!