External HDD

I bought another external hard drive from Costco in Portland. I've been backing up video files on my PC to DVD since my current 250 GB external drive is getting full. The new drive is a Western Digital 1 TB (1,000 GB) drive and it was only $140 (no sales tax in Oregon). With this drive, I probably won't need to burn another DVD for three years! They're still defining the capacity in MB, so even though the drive is technically 1,000,000 MB, it shows up as a 931GB drive on my computer. I thought there was a class action lawsuit about this.



The one problem so far is that the drive is pre-formatted using FAT32, probably so it is compatible with PC's running old Windows (98/NT). Since I want to store large video files (the 720p Beijing Olympics opening ceremony AVI is ~5GB), I needed to reformat the drive using NTFS since FAT32 only allows files <4GB. I started formatting the drive about 30 minutes ago using Vista Disk Management and it's only on 3%. At this rate, it's going to take another 16 hours to format the drive. :(

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Oops, my bad. I didn't check the Quick Format box so the computer is checking all 1 TB of space as it formats. I went back and created two 500 GB partitions and both formatted quickly.

My 250 GB external drive cost me about $150 a few years ago. That means the cost per GB has dropped 4x.