This weekend I had an impromptu splurge moment and decided that I was sick of downloading a new TV show only to have the error “ERROR: YOUR HARD DRIVE CAN’T FIT THIS SWEET, SWEET EPISODE OF ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT. YOU SHOULD LEARN HOW BURN STUFF ONTO DVD, BLANCO NINO.”
Burning stuff onto DVD is fine and all, but hey, why bother when you can pick up a snazzy external 320GB hard drive?
I was doing some research here and there on my trusty price checking websites -> pricenetwork.ca and redflagdeals.com
and at first was thinking of buying a SATA2 hard drive for $108 and an external hard drive case for $60 which basically comes out to $200 and I just realized I’m starting to talk techtalk so I’ll tone it down a little.
Then to compare I thought I would see if there are any external drives out there for cheaper and lo and behold, Best Buy had this sweet deal on for $119.99 with a $50 mail-in rebate. You gotta hate those rebates, but whatever. It’s still money in your pocket.
Pros: Well hey, it’s portable! It looks nice also. It’s also cheap.
Cons: Well, it isn’t SATA (Serial ATA) which cuts down on the speed it will transfer data at. But as I was saying to Duncan and Matt, I’m not too concerned with the milliseconds piling up over time (whereas Duncan was totally against this train of thought and wanted the fastest within a reasonable price range. Two different ways of thought, who knows who is right?!). Who cares if it’s going to take me ten more minutes to transfer an entire season of Star Trek onto the hard drive?
Also, I was a little concerned at first as to the name brand – Digital Research Technologies? Who the heck are they? Turns out they are an affiliate of I/O Magic and just slap random hard drives inside. Turns out it’s a Seagate inside which I have no qualms about.
So it’s my first external drive so I’ll let you know if I run into any problems with it. I bought it because I figured in the future, I will be buying a laptop and the hard drives on the laptop are very small in size for what I like to be able to do with them.