The Seagate

A few months back I started receiving a strange error message on my laptop. It seemed to occur most often when I was in Safari browsing the net. It was something about my start-up disk being nearly full. I had no idea what the start-up disk was, and thought maybe it was just one of those strange spyware pop-ups. It continued to appear on my screen without any predictable frequency. I trouble-shooted (is that a word?!) the problem as best I could: I searched my computer for a start-up disk, I browsed the Mac help topics for any mention of start-up disk, I pulled out my user manual and did the same, but all to no avail. I finally wrote down the message verbatim and called the Mac helpline. I repeated the message I had been receiving and explained when I found it most often occurred. Oh, he said, you're almost out of space on your computer, that's what the message means. IMPOSSIBLE, I said, I've had the computer for less than a year! Lets check, he said, and check we did, and wouldn't you know, he was right. I was dangerously low on hard drive space, with just a few hundred available megs.

Even after checking a half dozen times, I was in denial. No way could I have filled up my laptop in less than a year. It had to be a mistake. I checked and checked again. I recruited a friend to check with me. It was official, I was out of space. The culprit? Music. Copious amounts of music. But I wasn't about to part with even a single track of my hallowed music. I scoured my files for music I had back-up copies of and deleted those files off my hard drive. I deleted all the music videos I had downloaded and anything else I could part with. I freed up about a gig of space and then spent the last couple months frighteningly aware of the little amount of space left on my computer. I refused to upgrade to newer versions of applications lest they require any of the precious space. I resisted the urge to download any new music and tried to content myself with the 13 gigs of music I already had. But I started to grow weary of my self-imposed discipline. And so it came to pass that I finally broke down this weekend and bought The Seagate.

The Seagate is my new external hard drive and boasts an impressive 300GB of storage capacity. That's equivalent to 5,000 hours worth of music or just over 208 days. Holy shit, that's a lot of music! I have no current need for such a ridiculously large hard drive, but I'm a gal that loves a good deal. I was looking to spend no more that $150. The Seagate, normally $279, was on sale for $199 with a $50 mail in rebate. Voila, $150!!

I surprised myself by navigating through the set-up with relative ease, reformatting the FAT32 file format to a more Mac readable format ( I have no idea what this actually means, but I did it anyway!), moving my music files to the drive, and then setting up iTunes to look to the external drive for my music files. I even set-up Limewire to save to the new drive. I'm feeling geekier by the moment!

So you may wonder then why I still received that start-up disk message this afternoon. The short answer, I'm paranoid. My relationship with The Seagate feels like it's moving too fast. I've hardly acquainted myself with him, how can I entrust him to house and protect my treasured collection of music?! I know; I need to just get over myself and delete the music files on my hard drive before I crash my computer. I'm sure I'll be going all the way in a few short days, much to the happiness of my hard drive, but for now I can cross #172 off my list: buy an external hard drive with massive amounts of storage capacity.