External HD or "Thing to make Win/Mac switch that much easier"

This afternoon Em and I got a really nice external HD at CompUSA. They were having some really nice sales (and will be through at least part of next week) on HDs and external HDs. I got a 250GB Seagate USB2.0 external HD. (link here) .

I had been planning on buying 1 or 2 external HD enclosures to put a couple of my current IDE HDs into after I have switched over to the Mac. However, after thinking about, I decided that just buying a new external HD would be better (namely, it would be only slightly more expensive, would give me a brand new faster drive, I wouldn't have to worry about the age of the old drives, and I could use it to transfer files much easier).

So far, I have not had a single complaint and am loving it. I wanted at least 160GB (the size of the internal drive in the Mac I want) but 250GB is even better ;) . I have partitioned it with a 1 160GB partition (which will be formated to HFS+ once I have the Mac), two 32GB FAT32 partitions and one FAT32 partition with the rest of the space. You may be curious why the 3 FAT32 partitions. Well, A) FAT32 can be nativly read/written in both WinXP and Mac OS X and B) evidently in Windows XP, you can't format a partition over 32GB to FAT32. Only NTFS. However, FAT32 can support larger sizes, just Window's formatter sucks. So right now I have 3 where I wanted 1. All well, I will format it into one after I have the Mac and have copied everything to it.

So far, speeds have been good considering I only have USB 1.1 on my desktop (the drive supports 2.0 thank god).

Next up ... cleaning up current files, figuring out what I need/want/didn't even know I had, and copying it all to the new drive.

When I get the Mac I am going to more than likely purchase a copy of SuperDuper. I have looked at a couple backup programs so far and it looks to be the best combination of what I want. Using it, I will be able to have it create nightly incremental backup of my entire internal HD without thinking, and if anything ever happens to the interal drive, the Mac can boot from the USB drive with only a keystroke during boot-up. So, no more worrying about HD failure. :)

I am hoping to have a whole series of reviews/write-ups about the various software/hardware I use and the good, bad, and ugly of switching for a Windows user to a brand new iMac. Not a bard start.

Newest Blog

So, here is my latest blog. I am creating one again b/c:

1. People have bugged me to.
2. People have looked at me strange when I tell them I don't have one.
3. I sometimes have thoughts that I think others may think are interesting.
4. Sometimes I think #3 isn't true, but am curious to see if it is
5. I want to document some of the technical stuff I learn and find out what others think about it.
6. I will be purchasing a new iMac soon and wanted a way to post my thoughts about the experience.

So, lets see how long this one lasts. If you have any suggestions on what I should post about, let me know. Also, if you think Em should also have a blog let me/her know :)

please disregard this post. it was done to allow me to upload new image files so that I could change my blogs template (date changed to move off main page)


















Test post ... trying to upload new rounded corner images to use in modified template. Anyone who isn't named Ben can disregard.

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