February 07, 2004

Computer Upgrade

So I am quickly filling up the 2 30GB harddrives in my computer and trying to figure out weather I should buy a new harddrive to get more room or just put the money toward a new computer fund. I don't have capacity for a 3rd internal drive in my computer, which would be the cheepest way to expand. I could buy a large internal drive and move one of my 2 discs on to it. I could also buy an external Firewire drive that could go with my future laptop. Any suggestions?

Posted by Noah Brimhall at February 7, 2004 02:41 PM
Comments

What's your current computer? Hard drives are pretty inexpensive. I picked up a decent 80 gigger for $1/gig a while back, and they're only coming down in price. Less than $100 for over double your storage isn't a bad deal unless the computer it's all crammed into is just intolerable.

Posted by: mph at February 7, 2004 04:29 PM

I have a PowerMac G4 450 which is getting a little long in the tooth. Also, it only has room for 2 ATA/IDE drives and I already have two in there. I am starting to lean towards the external drive so that I can use it with my next computer.

Hard Drives are amazingly cheap though. When I bought my last 30GB drive (about 3 or 4 years ago) it was about $2/GB.

Posted by: Noah at February 9, 2004 08:57 AM

External Drives are loud, but the really are a necessity for when that emergency happens. Not that you'd ever have mp3s, but if for some reason you did, you could travel with them.

Posted by: Andy at February 9, 2004 10:46 AM

It took me nearly two months to think of a good reply to this post, but ...

If your next computer is going to be a laptop (regardless of the timeframe) don't bother getting another internal drive. External drives are not that loud, depending on the manufacturer (my SmartDisk is very quiet, and silent when it spins down), and provide a convenience over internals for moving from machine to machine.

Plus, if you get an external drive that has FireWire 400 and 800 ports, you'll be able to access it on the new computer using a very high transfer rate and yet still use it with your old G4.

Posted by: Eddie Hargreaves at March 30, 2004 03:26 PM