Last weekend I ran out of space on my primary computer hard drive.  My computer is a laptop and its about 18 months old.  When I purchased it, it was not quite the latest model, but it had a 120 gigabyte hard drive and a centrino duo processor and was fast enough for what I was doing at the time. 

It came with 1 gig of ram and the hard drive spun at 5400 rpms, which was slower than my previous laptop, which I had upgraded to 7200 rpms.  I always meant to upgrade the hard drive but just never had the time or extra few bucks to get to it.

Well, last weekend, my computer finally hit the 111 gigabytes full level and the computer wasn’t running right in my Dock-Office (Dockffice) because temperatures here are in the 90’s.

I’ve been doing more and more video work and that just fills up hard drive space very fast.  I hit the road and headed to Office Depot when I picked up a flyer offering a clearance deal before they reset for back to school stuff at twice the price.

I made it there and picked up a new router and wireless card.  Its a 1 gigabyte linksys router and card.  Then I headed to Best Buy where I picked up a 7200 rpm 200 gigabyte replacement drive for my laptop along with a 1 terabyte external western digital hard drive.  I intended to get the networkable drive from western digital but opted for the $140 cheaper drive that plugs in via usb. 

Next time the networkable drives drop in price, I’ll buy a 1 or 2 terabyte drive and then connect my existing 1 terabyte drive to that future drive and have 2 or 3 terabytes of space on my network.

I also picked up a high speed laptop cooling base station thing, to keep my laptop cool while it runs in my dockffice desktop (essentially a high top stocked bar).

All said and told I have a great deal more capacity and even more speed than I had before, which is definitely helping me get and keep things organized while I work more efficie ntly and effectively.

It has been a long time since I was impressed with a hardware buy ( I seem to recall with awe buying a 100 megabyte hard drive about 12 years ago thinking that was amazing). 

Now I have more space on my computer arrangement than I my entire company had working in a high rise in Atlanta including 30 some laptops and 3 servers running a $100 million dollar distribution business (owned by crooks in China that I turned into the IRS but that’s another story . . . .  ;)  ).

I’m sure this space will seem like a drop in the bucket after my video production moves to hi definition and I start working with multiple video inputs plugged in to a HDMI switch output to god knows what.  Maybe I’ll have to rent an exobyte (no idea how to even spell that ) from Google located in their new server room on the dark side of the moon operating at close to absolute zero temperatures or something.

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Last month I picked up a little hard drive, and it has rapidly become my favorite new electronic gizmo.  Its a hard drive and that may not sound glamorous or even as fun as GTA IV, but it just might be.

Its a 320GB Western Digital hard drive.  Its completely powered by USB, so I do not need any extra power cables or anything.  Its just a little longer than my Treo 700 and its half as thick!

This drive works with USB 2.0 and the drive is fast.  One of the things that I like about it is that its easier to add on to a laptop than doing a hard drive upgrade.

My current laptop has a 120 GB hard drive, and its pretty much full with pictures and video (from all of the tutorials and Camtasia videos that I create.

Upgrading a laptop hard drive is expensive and a little tedious.  But you can just plug in and play this micro monster.

Plus, its generally cheaper than upgrading your laptop hard drive too.

This only costs $135 at Buy.com for example.

Other Sizes

Now, I needed a lot of space because of my video work, but you can get smaller sizes (for less money too).   The 160 GB version from Western Digital is featured as one of Buy.com’s weekly deals with free shipping no less at a total of $79.99. 

Its the same size in physical dimensions and looks the same as well.   Or the in between size is 250 GB and costs about $113.  Color is not important for me, but if you are looking for color, they come in just about everything under the rainbow from black, red, blue, yellow, orange etc.  If you want sturdy and tough, there is a titanium cased version that typically costs an extra $10.

Now if you go looking for these, they are in the ‘My Passport’ Line.  There is also a ‘My Book’ line as well.  The My Passports are the thin little USB powered hard drives.

When You Need a Terabyte Drive

The My Books are named because they are about the size of a thin Harry Potter Book, but they have the added capability of being able to hold up to a terabyte of data and they can be configured to run on a network all by themselves.  I’m looking at getting one of those terabyte drives next.

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