Best Buy Stores (in the USA) has discounted the 500 Gigabyte Western
Digital My Book external USB 2.0 hard drive to $US149, which puts it
within a few bucks of the best internet prices...without the shipping and
risk.

I now have two...

These would make excellent storage in the cramped confines of your boat
as they do NOT have a noisy cooling fan and can operate in either
vertical or horizontal positions.

You don't need to install any of the software that comes with them, but
do install the Western Digital hard drive tools which are far superior to
anything Micro$oft provided. Copy these programs off to a CDR for
storage. They come on the hard drives with no backup.

After you've copied them to CDR, open CONTROL PANEL, then ADMINISTRATIVE
TOOLS, then COMPUTER MANAGEMENT. In COMPUTER MANAGEMENT, pick DISK
MANAGEMENT and right-click on the new drive called My Book. Click FORMAT
and reformat the old FAT32 structure that comes with it so old computers
and MACs can use it to NTFS, which XP and Vista do by default. It takes
about an hour to reformat this much storage space over the USB line.

It's an amazing amount of really compact storage you can easily swap
between home/office/laptop computers by simply plugging it in....

Now the GREAT news for mobile and boat users....IT'S 12VDC! The nice
little switching power supply that it is supplied with is 12VDC at 2A.
The connector is a standard DC power plug available at any electronics
store. Just buy or build a standard 2A, 12V power cord to plug into your
house batteries with the center hole of the plug POSITIVE. It couldn't
be better. The drive will run straight off your house batteries. It
also has automatic power switching! When you shut down the computer it's
hooked to, or simply unplug it, it shuts itself off. Plug it into a
running system and the DC in the USB cable turns it on for you....(c;

I've also run the first of these 500GB WD drives from a 4AH 12V AGM
battery in the back pocket of my laptop carrying case, making it a 500GB
self-powered laptop drive. The drive sleeps in a few minutes if you
don't get/store data to it. Its 16GB cache is also much nicer than the
really cheap no-name drives which aren't that much cheaper, any more.
The drive and its AGM battery stay in the laptop carrying case and I just
pull the USB cord out to plug it in. With automatic power, you don't
even need to worry if you turned it off...It turns itself off as soon as
you unplug it...(c;

At 500 GB, a massive space, you can do away with all those CDs and DVDs
that scratch so easily and are so fragile. They'd be no longer
necessary.

Well, I thought you'd like to have a heads up...
Larry
--
Format 29% complete on MONSTERDRIVE TWO...
LOAD 'ER UP! IT'S MOVIE TIME!