I picked up a portable 250gb drive last week and proceeded to offload a whole mess of stuff from the laptop and game machine over to it. Mostly media, like music and video, especially my iPod video versions of some DVDs I own (The West Wing, The Office) and iTunes-purchased stuff. I ended up clearing off roughly 90 gigs worth of stuff to reduce the strain of storage on my laptop from 77gigs to 37 gigs, and the game machine got eased roughly 17 gigs to make more room for other things.
One thing about personal storage that I always talk about is the goldfish bowl effect. As with most everything else, like wealth and the size of your bedroom, you eventually grow to accommodate the increase in size. With drive space, it’s pretty much true. The bigger the drive, the more crap you’ll hang onto. Like a goldfish who gets moved into a bigger bowl; the fish will grow in size to accommodate the newer and bigger bowl. I could have bought a 500gb drive and then I would be screwed because I’d eventually accumulate so much new music and video that I would use the drive less as a backup and more as a primary, I have no other drives I could use to backup that information upon. Even my 60gb iPod is now dwarfed in light of the new drive.
I’m a little antsy about my backup routine. I’ve been burned twice by drive failures and the last thing I really want right now is to find out that Portia is a bum drive. Yeah, I named the drive Portia after the character from The Merchant of Venice (and the moon of Uranus) because the drive’s exterior design was conceived by F. A. Porsche. I thought it was appropriate. Anyway, so now I’m trying to figure out if it would be wise to have a second drive and mostly if I could afford to pick up a 500gb drive to make sure I’m not three sheet to the wind with the single drive. At this point, I’m pretty sure my wife would answer the question for me right now and say no, only because it’s Christmas and we already spent the cash on the first drive. 🙂
2 comments
i’m pretty sure that’s a lacie drive, right? i’ve found their more recent models have been really reliable, although i don’t have the porsche one. i use two 250gbs to store a crapload of media files to use in making my tv shows, and they haven’t failed me in the nearly 2 years i’ve had them.
Yeah, it’s a LaCie drive. I’m liking it a lot so far. I was worried about the drive noise, based on some of the opinions listed at epinions, but then I wasn’t expecting to get a Porsche drive. 🙂