External Drive

I need more hard drive space. I'm building up a massive video library for a project I'm working on and I'm quickly running me out of drive space. My audio library already consists of about 500 CDs worth of music (yes, all the originals are safely stored in their jewel cases). I'm storing a large archive of uncompressed AVI files from personal video projects I might want to re-edit in the future. Now this new project is quickly taking over all the remaining available space. I could dump some of the content to DVD-Rs, but that would slow me down when I want to quickly access a specific file.

A new drive has two major requirements: It needs to be at least 250GB and it needs to be of the external FireWire variety. I'll take FireWire over USB any day, because I can daisy chain the FireWire drives together, keeping my USB bus free for other devices. I can turn up plenty of drives meeting these two criteria. Finding one with an attractive price tag is a bigger challenge. I found the Maxtor One Touch 300GB for $293 at the beginning of July. So far, this 300GB drive is the only external drive I can find with a price tag under $1/GB; I'm not willing to pay more. The 250GB models all seem to be over $1/GB and anything larger than 300GB steps into the realm of outrageous pricing. If you happen to be in the market for a bigger drive, take a look at this one, before you pay too much for your space. And of course, if you know of anything cheaper, tell me about it.

As promised, the time has come to announce the winner of the Rio Chiba Sport MP3 Player. After making a randomly generated selection of all users who posted at least once from the forum launch date thru the end of the day on August 31, 2004, forum user hooges turned up the winner. There are even more opportunities to win this month, so I highly encourage you to keep posting (or register and start posting). So far this month, we've got boxed copies of PhotoImpact XL, VideoStudio 8, and DVD Workshop Express from Ulead, as well as a seriously awesome package from SnapStream. These are software packages with retails prices starting at about $90; all you need to do to qualify is post a question or help somebody.

So far, this 300GB drive is the only external drive I can find with a price tag under $1/GB; I'm not willing to pay more. The 250GB models all seem to be over $1/GB and anything larger than 300GB steps into the realm of outrageous pricing. If you happen to be in the market for a bigger drive, take a look at this one: http://jakeludington.com/maxtor300gb, before you pay too much for your space. And of course, if you know of anything cheaper, tell me about it.

As promised, the time has come to announce the winner of the Rio Chiba Sport MP3 Player. After making a randomly generated selection of all users who posted at least once from the forum launch date thru the end of the day on August 31, 2004, forum user hooges turned up the winner. There are even more opportunities to win this month, so I highly encourage you to keep posting (or register and start posting). So far this month, we've got boxed copies of PhotoImpact XL, VideoStudio 8, and DVD Workshop Express from Ulead (http://www.ulead.com), as well as a seriously awesome package from SnapStream. These are software packages with retails prices starting at about $90; all you need to do to qualify is post a question or help somebody.