Decided to get a real external hard drive. I was using a couple old IDE Hard Drives OMD had gave me a couple years back. Neither drive has been the same after the crash I had last summer. I would get random errors and sometimes when I booted up Vista didn't pickup the drives (of course that could have to do with me forgetting to turn them on).
So while I was out this evening I went over to Wal Mart and picked up a Western Digital My Book 500 GB external drive. Having dealt with trying to get those make-shift externals to work, I was prepared for a bit of challenge with this new drive. There was a fold-out double-sided 11x17 piece of paper containing 3 simple steps. Plug the power cable into the drive, plug the USB cable into the drive and then follow the on-screen install instructions. I was up and running in less than 2-minutes.
I really like how I don't have to remember to turn it on and off. When the computer is off the drive turns off automagically. Also has a nice compact adapter plug which barley takes any space. Even the unit itself is fairly compact , about the size of paperback book.
