I just bought an external 2.5″ USB drive with a capacity of 250(!) GB. It’s a Western Digital Passport drive – $169 at Circuit City. I’m using an external 2.5″ USB drive while traveling for backup purposes and to carry various virtual machine images.

This new WD drive looks stylish, seems to be pretty fast and is very silent. It appears it’s available as “pure” SATA drive too, so I guess 250 GB will be available in Laptops soon …

According to the Disk Size Theorem, my old 120 GB drive was almost full, so I have plenty of space for backups and virtual machines again

Way back at my Amiga days, I bought a 20 MB (mega bytes!) hard disk. I really felt like having unlimited space then. Remember, at these days not all were at floppy disks (with 720KB) already – some were still dealing with “streamers” which were actually music cassette players …

Some time later I bought a 45 MB drive and so forth.

These days, with hard drives reaching the Terra Bytes limit,  HD’s still get  “full” out of the blue. Esp. if you are traveling with a laptop, you can not just exchange the drive or hook up a second one, so you need to clean up from time to time.

There is an Open Source tool WinDirStat which uses a so called Tree Map visualization technique, which easily allows you to identify memory hogs on your hard disk.

The screen shot below does not show a single directory, but the full directory hierarchy. Its very easy to use, so maybe give it a try next time your available space is reaching the 1% barrier