I have been running low on storage space for a while now. I was considering moving all my episodes of Greek and Californication off of my external hard drive and onto DVDs, saving lots of space. But that would involve bringing my drive into work, buying DVDs, and burning them. Then I considered micromanaging my media: deleting cached files in Unreal, deleting the New Music Canada podcasts that I didn’t particularly like… even deleting the new Miles Davis albums that I’ve acquired.
Instead, I opted for a more long-term solution: a new external hard drive.
I last expanded my storage space in 2006. Back then, I had only the 80 GB of 5,400 RPM internal storage that came with my PowerBook G4. In March, I bought a 250 GB FireWire 800/400 drive from Other World Computing, and have been satisfied since. I used it to store music, movies, TV shows, and other media; two other partitions housed a backup of my internal hard drive and a bootable system for emergencies and maintenance.
After two and a half years of living within my means, the 330 GB started to become restrictive. My backup partition continually hits capacity, the boot partition is too small to perform a system upgrade, and I’m down to less than a gigabyte on my media partition. On my internal drive, I’ve been using my buffer space (used for virtual memory) for storage, slowing my computer’s daily operations.
Basically, I have no room for anything new.
To remedy this situation, I bought a snazzy new OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro 7,200 RPM FireWire 800/400, USB 2.0, eSATA drive. The size? A whopping one terabyte! I’ll now have 1,330 GB of storage—four times what I’ve had for the past two years. Oh, it’ll be glorious!
What’s awesome is that the cost of storage goes down all the time. Back in 2006, I got the 250 GB drive for $211. Today, I bought four times the storage for only $225—$14 more. That’s a drop from 84¢/gigabyte to 23¢/gigabyte in just two years. Ridiculous.
