Brennan’s Blog

I have seen that you can now get a 200mb drive for about $120. That seems to be the sweet spot for the price/storage space ratio. You can find one at CDW.com. Then you get a $40 external enclosure. I found one at usb-ware.com. You place the 200gb drive into the external and plug it into your computer. You can then copy all of your files over to the drive as a backup and then store away that external in someplace which it is fireproof and a place where it will not be stolen. It is best to put it in another location as well if you are really serious about the backup.

Then every 6 or 12 months you can buy a new drive to place into the enclosure and start with a new disk. Keep the older disk around as a long term and permanent copy. Altogether you just need to spend $160. That seems well worth it to make sure all of your personal digital photos and music purchased from iTunes are safe.

Notice also that drive enclosure is both USB and Firewire compatible. Another drive which only does USB is still $40. So it best to just go for the Firewire version. You may want to hook it up to a Firewire device sometime. All modern Macs use Firewire but so do many digital video cameras. You could backup your videos quickly to the disk in this encloser.

Another interesting option with such an external drive... many motherboards support booting from a USB2 external drive. You could install various systems onto separate drives and plug in the one you wish to use and boot that system. I can think of all kinds of uses for that.

In my work environment it would be helpful to have a Java development environment set up on one drive and a .NET environment on another. Then client projects could be placed on the respective drive. Sure you could simply run VirtualPC or dual boot a system, but this seems like a quick and easy way to provide running environments with less hassle. No performance degredation or possible incompatibilities due to emulation and no lack of space due to sharing the drive with another installed system with a dual booting computer. Just plug in and boot.