Since switching to using mainly laptops I’ve found hard drive space a bit of an issue, since they’re not exactly well endowed in that department (although that is changing).

So I’ve been using external drives to help bump up storage. Our current weapon of choice at work is a 160GB Freecom drive which we picked for a number of reasons, but mainly because they were cheap (heh) and we’d be lugging them about in our laptop bags and they were pretty compact in size. But as it turns out the small format factor meant it was noisy since the casing is metal and because of that, they get pretty hot.

And really, a 160GB isn’t a great deal of space nowadays. When you start using Virtual Machines and running databases off them that space quickly disappears. So I thought lets try something that’s XXL and went and bought a 500GB Western Digital MyBook.

It’s like a mini Xbox in form factor expect not quite as ugly. In fact, it’s, dare I say it, quite cute looking. And whilst it’s certainly bigger than the Freecom it definitely runs a lot cooler due it’s funky plastic case design, which has pretty good airflow through it. Plus it’s quieter, but I don’t know whether that’s down to the internal drive being one of those new fangled SATA drives or the case being bigger and more open.

The only snag with it is there is so much storage that backing it up somewhere else is an issue. No where on the network at work has that much space (free) and I certainly don’t have that much space at home. Hmmm… well there’s only one thing to do… buy another one for backups!