My gadgets : New External Hard Drive

I am starting a new personal project - building a media repository to consolidate and backup all my media files - image, text, audio, video. This means all my ebooks and reference documents, photos, music, audiobooks and podcasts, TV series, and movies would be in one place. I bought a 160GB hard drive and external enclosure at the PC Fair, for RM388 (USD$100). The enclosure is nothing special, quite cheap and easy to install - 2 connectors (power and data) and eight screws to hold everything in place. The actual space on the Seagate hard drive is around 149GB, which is enough for around 300 hours of video. The enclosure supports USB 2.0 (High Speed) which is fast enough when transferring data from my iBook. One problem is that most of my stuff is archived on hundreds of CDs, and my CD drive (being a combo DVD/CDRW) on the iBook only reads at 24x speed. So it takes around 10 minutes to copy over a CD, depending on the number of files. The final result would be to have all of my digital media in a box the size of a paperback book. With storage costs getting lower and lower, I would anticipate that I would have a terabyte of data (1000GB) within the next 18 months. I am working on a concept, a "big picture" of how this would affect people like me within the next few years. I'll talk about the concept further in an upcoming blog entry. In the meantime, I have already filled up 40GB of my new drive - and there's plenty more where that came from.