I’ve been thinking lately about getting a portable hard drive that I can store my mp3s and pictures on. Right now, that stuff is on my desktop. Since I have my laptop and desktop networked, I can access them from my laptop. But I have to have the desktop on. And I’d rather not turn that on. It’s loud. And since the desktop is rather old (over 8 years I believe), it’s gonna die eventually. I don’t want to lose my music and pictures. If I had that stuff on an external, portable hard drive, then when the desktop died, I’d still have them. And I could access them without having to turn on the desktop as long as I plugged it in to the desktop.

My plan was to do some research online to figure out what I wanted. Well, I never got around to doing that. But I was looking through the Best Buy ad and noticed that they had several kinds on sale this week. I did check out a couple of them online and decided to get the Western Digital 250GB My Essential Portable Hard Drive. So I went to Best Buy this afternoon and bought it. I couldn’t pass it up. It’s normally about $150 and it was on sale for $99.99. I also bought a case for it. That way I can take it with me if I go on a trip and not have to worry about keeping it safe.

I couldn’t believe how small it was. I have an external hard drive for my work laptop. It’s HUGE. And it has to be plugged in. The one I bought is tiny (see the pic below). It’s not much bigger than my digital camera. The pic shows it relative to my mouse and cell phone.

Click to enlarge

And the other thing that I like is that it doesn’t have to be plugged in. It’s powered just by plugging it into my laptop via USB. It’s exactly what I wanted. It did have some software installed on it to set up a sync program as well as a few other things. I removed all that stuff … didn’t want it. I did copy it to my laptop in case I change my mind later. But for now, I just want a hard drive that I can copy my stuff to. I don’t want to set up any syncing software.

I copied all of the pictures I have on my desktop to the drive this afternoon. That didn’t take long. A while back, I burned a bunch of pics to CD because I was running out of disk space. So I don’t have much left on my desktop. Now, my mp3s on the the other hand, that was a different story. I have around 5GB on my desktop. That took a while to copy over. But it’s all on the portable drive now. I need to get busy ripping the rest of my CDs. I have a bunch that I wish I had on my computer. I’ll get to that eventually.

I sure have been busy getting tech toys lately. Since Christmas, I have gotten my laptop, my digital camera, and now the portable hard drive. My next new toy will come toward the end of July. I’ll be eligible for a new cell phone (using Verizon’s ‘New Every Two’ program). I’m contemplating getting a ‘fancier’ phone … one with a qwerty keyboard, maybe even a BlackBerry or a phone like that. I just don’t know that I need one that fancy. And I don’t know if I could justify the cost of a plan for internet access. But I have time to decide.