It had been 11 months since I bought my last external hard drive. All the drives in my house were close to maxing out. Between the 3 hard drives, the external, the one in the desktop and the one in the laptop, there was 30gb of free space combined. Some people would think that is a lot of space, others would say that it is time for a new drive. I knew it was definitely time for a new drive.

The past week, I have downloaded heaps of TV shows due to the releases of the new seasons. I ended up downloading about 25 different shows this week. If each episode is 350mb, thats about 9gb for the week. I would definitely be needing another drive if I planned on downloading full season of each of these shows.

This morning, we were going to the local computer shop to pick up a monitor for the old computer. The previous one had died (and smelt bad too I may add.) We got a nice 19″ LCD monitor, a major upgrade from the 5 year old 15″ CRT display. While picking up that, I grabbed an external drive off the shelf, a Western Digital My Book 500gb. This hard drive will be plenty of room for the next 11 months, hopefully. I currently have plans on getting another drive of double capacity in 11 months time just to start a nice trend.

I copied all the TV shows, movies, and PSP games from my old drive to the new one, leaving only documents and video podcasts to take up space on the old external drive. I really like this external drive too, it is much better than any other one I have seen and tried. It looks very nice and words nice too. The best feature of the drive is that there are no buttons, no switches, it turns it self of with the computer or if you safely remove the drive. This means that I don’t have to worry about powering the drive and such. This would be perfect as a second storage drive for a desktop computer as it would power up and down with the computer without the user having to do anything.

The total of all drives at home now reach 1000gb, which sounds like a lot of storage but really it isn’t. I could easily use it in a short period of time. I am extremely happy with my purchase and would definitely recommend a Western Digital My Book to anyone looking for an external drive. Now I just need to download more TV shows to store on it and need more time to watch everything. Then in a year or so, its time for a terabyte drive for me!

Today, season 3 of Prison Break returned. This is the first of many fall shows returning in the next 2 or so weeks. This season of Prison Break doesn’t seem as interesting, or as good as the following season but lets give it a chance. Many new characters were introduced in this episode which leaves me with some questions as well as a little confusion. I am getting the sense that in this season, we will finally see the bigger picture of what is going on. Hopefully they don’t drag this show out for a fourth season because then they are just dragging the horse for a bit too long.

Now it is time for two of my favourite TV shows (I have a lot of favourite shows) to go into Hiatus for the Summer. Monk and Psych aired their 9th episode of the season yesterday and are now having a break and returning back in the middle of January 2008.

Monk was unusual and wasn’t as good as it normally was. It was very random and confusing and didn’t have the same “interesting” case(s) that it normally did. Still worth watching but it didn’t meet up to its normal standard. What Monk lacked, Psych had. It was a great episode, the best out of all the episodes that have aired to date in my opinion. The last scene was something that had been building up in the series for a long time now. It was somewhat expected but the creators put a spin on it and made it interesting by making something that was nothing happen, which we pretty funny and well done.

Well now these series are having a break, it will free up 1 and 1/2 hours a week. It can make room in my schedule for the other shows that are returning in the next few weeks. I could also save another hour by only watching Diggnation once a week but is that really necessary?

As you should all know, Apple has dropped NBC Shows on iTunes because NBC wanted to increase the cost to $4.99 per episode. Thats an insane $100 plus for a whole season. You can get the DVDs after the season has aired for a quarter the price of that or get it on TV and only have to pay the provider subscription. This is a stupid move and can only lead to a loss for NBC.

In fair honesty, why not pirate it. You get a higher quality than iTunes provides, it’s incredibly cheap to download and you have the freedom to watch it where you want. I admit to downloading TV shows and I don’t think its doing any harm. I don’t have time to watch TV so I end up downloading my shows and watching it before it airs in New Zealand. I also get the freedom to watch a show when I want to watch it and on what device. I am not restricted in any way (except for the speeds I can download at.)

As a Digg user said, “In other news, every BitTorrent site in the world has announced that they’ll still be carrying NBC shows. Enjoy the revenue drop you greedy shits.” No one could have said it any better than that.