500 Gigabytes of Awesomeness

When I bought my Macbook Pro I never thought I’d fill up my hard-drive within a year. I have a 120 gig HD in this puppy, and I figured it would last me for quite some time before I would even be thinking about getting more space. I was wrong.

Unbeknownst to me, I quickly acquired a ton of huge files quicker than I ever thought, and here I am, less than one year later, running out of space. My former laptop came with what now seems like a paltry 30 gig drive, and I had it for three years and never filled it up. It’s blowing my mind that I could fill up four times that in less than one-third the time. C’est la vie. It doesn’t help that each episode of Pressed & Bound takes up 4+ gigs of space. Those chewed through my hard-drive faster than a chipmunk on a cinnamon stick. Because of this quickly dwindling amount of space (the lowest of which got to 2 gigs left), I had to break down and purchase an external harddrive. So far I’m loving it.

The P&B files were eating my computer to bits (har), so I took a swift jaunt over to the local, evil conglomerate corporation – in this case Best Buy – to see what I could see. After I covertly jumped through and around the aisles in a vain attempt to miss any confrontations with employees, I found what I was looking for: The Western Digital My Book. Clocking in at a whopping 500 gigabytes of space, I have placed my new hard-drive on my desk with the acumen of someone who knows how to place an external hard-drive on a desk. It’s a sleek little device, I must say. It doesn’t look like some big, ugly thing that you’d definitely want to place out of sight. This, of course, is subjective, but I like the way it looks and want it easily seen.

In terms of ease of use, the device has two ports in the back: power and one USB. Just plug it in and you’re ready to go. The one thing that I had to do for my super huge video files was to reformat the drive away from Fat32. If you’re on a Mac, you’ll want to do this with Disk Utility. Hit the erase tab and go to town. After that I started throwing my big files on the thing, and now I have reclaimed 63 gigs of space. I feel much better about myself and my computer situation. The device ran me about $140 including tax, and that’s not too shabby at all.