Tech Up

This weekend I was a bit reckless in my spending. Although I did not take advantage of the Black Friday sales (which I still think that don't exist, unless you sleep outside the store and muscle your way in at 5 a.m.) I still purchased a lot of things. While most of them are still not to be disclosured (Christmass gifts) I also took care of my tech needs and bought some replacements for my current gadgets. First, my back-up HDD (a 160GB SATA Western Digital, amazing drive, impecable so far) is demanding an upgrade and I took the big step and bought a 1 TB (Terra-byte sounds sooo goood!) Western Digital Caviar (still SATA) for 99$ (Newegg still rules in all these deals, although one can barely find any "Free shipping" deals).


Next, mostly out of curiosity and desire to offer the very best conditions to my new SATA backup, I decided to buy an external enclosure with a big fan. Although, WD are pretty cool and I NEVER had any heat issues with it, I want to be safe. Hence, I got this Rosewill enclosure with a 8cm fan that should more than suffice for the job. At 25 bucks is quite a good deal. Hope it will last (reviews were quite OK, but not perfect). And if you wonder, yes, in the end I payed up shipping (EggSaver was somehow not available, but only in the last step of the transaction and I didn't want to back down then).However, for the first time the enclosure arrived DOA so I was a bit disappointed. Still, I managed to tweak the fan into working and I was very pleased that I didn’t had to waste more time and money to get a replacement. Now the enclosure works fine and the HDD is always cool. The only problems I had were to use Mac Partitions of 500GB under Windows using a recognition program. That resulted in some failures to w/r after prolonged usage time. However, I switched to NTFS and so far, so good. Just that MacOSX cannot write these. On the other hand, I think FAT32 would be disastrous for such a huge HDD.

Finally, just to put the cherry on the cake I also purchased a mp3 player, in this case a Sandisk Sansa Fuze: 8GB, 2.5 color screen, thumb-wheel, FM radio and recorder. Cool features: you can record music off your favorite station, and play all sorts of videos, although the screen is quite small. I also got a 2GB micro SD card with the SD and miniSD adaptors for 5$ and a travel kit (complimentary!) from Newegg.com that contains plug charger, car charges, some great noise isolating earphones, extension cable etc. That makes the whole package a 10GB MP3 player with a lot of accessories for 75$...way better than an Ipod mini, which is the main competitor. The sound is great, the battery unbelievable (around 24hrs.) and the earphones from the travel kit have a great bass. Excellent value!