The sublime hard disk story is that I am now running a MacBook with a 500GB disk.

When I bought the MacBook eighteen months ago it was a risk, as although I had always wanted a Mac I wasn't sure whether I wanted to use anything other than Microsoft software. But the possibility of booting into a MS OS was there with the new intel chips and so I took the plunge. The choice was made less difficult by the fact that the 13.3" MacBook cost less than equivalent 12" PC portables at the time.

But still I went for the cheapest MacBook and immediately upgraded it's memory and it's hard disk. That was from 60GB to 160GB and cost something like 140 Euros at the time (for the hard disk upgrade - the memory upgrade cost about the same again).

As alway with hard disk space, it was used up (Virtual machines take up a lot of space and I had both Parallels VMs and also VM Fusion VMs) quickly and I had occasional minor problems caused by there not being enough spare disk space (typically a 50 minute streamed video would die halfway through) but nothing serious.

But I was for some reason glancing through the web site of the local best (= best selection by far and reasonably competitive prices) supplier of computers and related items and noticed, what I think was a 250GB drive, portable drive at a reasonable price.

Well there's no way I'm going to pay money and go through the upgrading hassle to go from 160GB to 250GB but it got me interested enough to check the site for more drives from the same company (Western Digital) and I found first 320GB drives and then a 500GB drive. The money was peanuts (ca 100 Euros) and going from 160GB to 500GB was a very attractive idea so I went for it (after having checked some Apple forum posts - found via Google - to see if it would work in my MacBook.)

Now a couple of evenings later (one backup off my small form-factor portable USB drive to a larger USB drive; one use of SuperDuper! to copy my MacBook's 160GB drive to the portable USB drive and make it bootable; and then on evening 2 changing the MacBook drive (took even me less than half an hour and most of that was finding the right screwdriver to transfer the hard drive cover); booting from the portable drive and running SuperDuper! to this time copy the portable drive's contents to the 500GB drive and make IT bootable), it's working and working well.

So now - for a no doubt brief moment - I have 340 GB free on my MacBook's hard disk. This by the way is 20GB more than the largest hard disk that Apple supply for the MacBook Pro (where changing hard disks is not for the faint-hearted and takes the portable out of warranty)!

(The SuperDuper! web page is here http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html It's free for what I did and costs i think 29.95 for advanced functions)

So much for sublime - what's the ridiculous ?

I was idly glancing through the December issue of Windows ITPro and there was a Review of the "Toshiba 320GB USB 2.0 Portable 2.5" External Hard Drive" (long name but that's the name they used at the top of the column).

What was ridiculous was that every hard disk manufacturer under the sun has their own completely equivalent 320GB USB 2.0 2.5 portable external drive (I have one from Buffalo for instance and the Western Digital one looks really nice too) and very probably the Toshiba one actually uses a drive from one of those manufactures.

Yet the article was written as if such a drive was kind of new and revolutionary and that you could only get one from Toshiba.

Now it's well known to people from England (where the magazines often say that they don't like the product they are testing) that US magazines always like to put a positive slant on things they are testing, but ignoring the fact here that there are many alternatives (in slightly different physical sizes and in a wide range of disk sizes) if you want a portable USB drive is just criminal - or to put it in another way to match the title of this piece, ridiculous.