In the ‘cool stuff’ category

Warning: if you’re not a computer geek and you have no interest in computer gadgets, reading this blog entry will cause your brain to dissolve into a liquid, leak out your ears, and stain your shirt.

Because I’m upgrading from a desktop to a notebook shortly, I found myself with an ickle problem: what to do with my 60GB hard drive? It’s nearly full of vids, music, and photos. I couldn’t possibly squeeze all of that and the 20 gigs on my primary drive into my notebook. Well here’s the answer…

This brilliant little gadget is a drive kit for mounting a hard drive or CD-ROM drive externally. You can mount pretty much any IDE drive inside the box, which plugs into a USB 2 port. For Macophiles, it also comes in a Firewire version.

With a transfer rate “up to” 480 megabits per second with USB 2 and significantly less than that with USB 1.5, it’s slower than an internal drive. Notebooks, however, don’t give you the option of mounting extra drives internally, so this is a nice solution. And it comes in a purty two-colour box.

So now my media has a new home, and if/when I get another hard drive, I can use one of those removable drive trays in it to swap out the drives as needed. Nifty.