My external hard drive died on me a couple of months back. It was really annoying because I was using that hard drive for my old Asus Eee PC 701. If you’re not familiar with ancient artifacts from an age long gone, the Eee PC 701 – the first netbook, actually – had only a measly 4 gigabytes of storage. The operating system (either a lightweight Linux distro, or a very stripped-down Windows XP) would take up around 2 gigabytes, which meant that I only had space for a few photos and a couple of text files.

An external hard drive was a godsend, I tell you. Okay, I admit that I was too cheap to buy a good one. I skimped on my money and bought an old model that could hold only 60 gigabytes. For a few months it served me well, and I was able to store a few albums, movies and TV shows on it. The game plan was that I save up for an actual, decent laptop with a few hundred gigabytes of storage.

However, my cheapness got the better of me – the external hard drive died on me one day. All my files, my music, everything – gone. I was stuck with a netbook with 4 gigabytes of storage and a handful of 2 gigabyte USB flash drives. It was an awful time. I did manage to buy a new laptop and was able to reacquire the things I lost, but I could have saved me some time and money if I only did not decide to take the cheap, easy route.

This is why for my future back up and travel storage needs, I am going to buy the Western Digital 1TB external hard drive – you get what you pay for, and I learned a really harsh lesson.