Friday, March 21, 2008

Totally frivolous use of a huge hard drive

A few weeks ago, I purchased a wonderful 750GB external hard drive. We have TiVo and I use my desktop computer as remote storage for shows that I want to save. I mean, after all, my TiVo only stores about FORTY HOURS of programming. ... Yes, I know that's a lot. However, last year we recorded two entire seasons of "Star Trek: Voyager", and we sometimes record movies that we've been meaning to watch which aren't readily available at Blockbuster.

OK. I know I'm rationalizing here. But here is the ultimate frivolous, TiVo-related, use of this grotesquely large hard drive:

We do not subscribe to any of the premium cable channels (HBO, SHOWTIME, CINEMAX, etc.) This weekend, HBO and Cinemax are free. So, we're basically recording about 60 hours of movies and off-loading them to my hard drive periodically. This way, we have a little library of 'on demand' programming of our own design. No driving to the video store. No waiting for the movie to arrive in the mail. No paying to buy it (even used). We have over twenty movies queued up to record this weekend. Most of them are movies that we've been wanting to see. Some are flicks that we'd consider picking up if we noticed them in the video store.

We do get Encore and Flix, and we've started gathering a little stock pile from those two channels. After the writers' strike, we truly appreciate having a stock pile of things to watch. With the new hard drive, I could easily stockpile over 500 hours worth of movies and still have room to back up photos and music files. ... I wonder if I should have sprung for the full terabyte?

We are SO indulgent.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Aren't computers grand?

Similar to that, my husband informed me recently that we have over 2 GB of music on our hard drive. And he wondered what Bill "Nobody will ever need more than 640K" Gates would have thought about that.