I resurrected an old HP printer today, but the ink cartridges in it had long ago, apparently, dried up. So it was off to Office Depot I went. Once there, I browsed for a bit, and then found the cartridges, paid and left the store. As I got into my car, something that I had seen whilst browsing came back to me. It was an amazing price on a hard drive. So back in I went to check it out. It was a Maxtor, 200 Gb, 7200 RPM drive, for $99. I just can’t get over how cheap drives are now. The first hard drive I ever bought was back in 1989. I paid $200 for a 20 megabyte drive. This drive today was $0.50/gigabyte; quite a difference.

Anyway, I thought about it for a while, since it was such a good price, but I don’t have any spare drive bays in my computer. I have already bought an external USB 160Gb drive, so I looked at buying an external enclosure for this drive, but they were $69, and I didn’t want to spend that much more. I actually left the store then, and was almost out of the parking lot, when it occurred to me that if I removed the 60 Gb drive that I use for backups from inside my computer, I could put the 200 Gb drive in, effectively gaining 140 Gb. So I went back and bought it. Once installed, this will bring my total disk space up to 460 Gb. Sweet. I’ll get an external enclosure later for the 60 Gb drive and strap it back on later…