Life on the Spot! Life and Leisure in Doha, Qatar

My 750 Gb hard disk upgrade has finally arrived and is now chugging gigabytes of data on my PC. The Western Digital WD7500AAKS is part of the WD Caviar SE16 line and has a rotational speed of 7200, 16mb cache and uses Perpendicualr Magnetic Recording (PMR) which means faster performance. So this should be a big yet fast hard drive. I ordered it of Frys.com on January 5 for roughly $160 and got it here in Doha on the 15th through Aramex Shop & Ship (paid 70QR shipping fee). I'm not sure how much you're going to get the thing in Doha as I haven't gone to Sofitel to ask. But I'm sure this is going to be more expensive.

 

Since Mavis and Xiane were on the way home after visiting their friends, I asked her to get the package from Aramex. While waiting for them to come home, I cleaned the PC and looked if I have the required cables needed. I didn’t really know if I ordered a retail kit or a bare drive so I was already thinking of where to buy the SATA cable if I ordered the latter. When Mavis and Xiane arrived, I quickly opened the box and found out it was indeed a bare drive. I didn’t have any SATA cable so after lunch/dinner, I asked Mavis if I could go out and see if the computer stores in our area had one to sell. Though it was so cold and drizzling, I drove to a store in Matar Qadeem and to Family Food Center, where they have a computer shop upstairs. Sadly, both of them didn’t have what I was looking for. I resigned myself to not being able to install and test the drive that night. Yesterday, I was able to ask a colleague if he had an extra SATA cable and was lucky enough to have one (thanks Stephen!). So the moment I got home, I busied myself to installing the drive, formatting it and moving my files from my D: partition to the new F: (520Gb) and G:(whatever is remaining). It was really needed to add a bigger drive since I’m running out of space on my PC’s 200Gb hard drive. My 500 Gb external drive is full as well and with the upcoming TV shows (Terminator and American Idol), I’m sure I would have needed to delete some of my files. I already had the ER, CSI, CSI Miami as casualties since I had to delete some of the episodes to accommodate newer downloads. Plus, since I’ll be using the Xbox 360 as a Media Extender, it would be easy to just share these drives to the 360 and viola, pure viewing pleasure upconverted to HD through the HDMI connection. Still, it is not as robust as the old Xbox Media Center on my old Xbox. (Just a note: the Xbox 360 should be able to play/Stream .avi, .divx, .mp4, .m4v, .mp4v, .mov, .wmv along with jpg,bmp and mp3.).

 

I haven’t checked how many gigabytes I still have left on the new drive but I’m not too concerned yet. I was telling Mavis that when I started using the PC, roughly between 1995-1996, one would be happy enough if he gets a 1 Gb drive which would cost around US$500 to US$600! You’d even be amazed at how that 1 gig doesn’t seem to run out of space as there is really nothing for your to add except for your Word documents, some photos or images and games unless you install a lot of games. Applications were installed through multiple floppy discs while other were already using CDs. Still, the applications weren’t bloated and consume minimal space. And you constantly had to delete your TMP and TEMP files. Now, the lowest that you’d have pre-installed on your computer would be 80Gb or 120gb. You’d have difficulty looking for a new 40Gb drive! And with all your media files, even a 120Gb drive is not enough to satisfy your data hunger. With RAM, you’d consider yourself lucky if you get 16 or 32 Mb on your rig. The standard now, as driven by the need of applications or your OS to run properly, would be 1Gb.

 

Hopefully, the new drive doesn’t just die on me and would keep me happy for at least 2 years of service. I’m sure it’s going to fill up in less than a years’ time but till then, I’d content myself to being able to download anything without worrying of not having enough space.