Need more mémoire magnétique

The knuckles of my greedy, nimble, download-hungry fingers are painfully scraping up against the Iron Curtain of available hard drive space.


After years of Torrenting discographies of obscure electro bands and blues legends for no-good-reason, my 160GB laptop hard drive is just about full. I've resorted to cramming senseless data in the nooks and crannies of my dedicated Windows partition. After all, deleting things is not an option.

My 60BG external laptop drive now waffles between 1BG and 0GB free depending on which disposable episode-of-the-night I've thrown onto it. I need a few more cobalt-alloy platters. The question is where they will live, and how I'll be utilizing them.

So just buy more, you say. I dread buying an external hard drive-- I really do. I begrudgingly bought an enclosure for my old 60GB laptop hard drive back when I upgraded to 160GB internal (because having 60GB of potential storage gathering dust is the dumber of two dumbs). Now it serves to hold all the obscure TV shows I downloaded once-upon-a-time and have no intention of watching again anytime soon along with ISO backups of my software, big movie project files, and some other critical backup shit. But even with my one external drive holding almost nothing of significance, I sometimes find myself on-campus or at-work wishing I had easy access to them.

See, I believe that humankind is too far along its technological renaissance to justify carrying around anything except a laptop with a network connection and a power cord. Some may argue that this isn't necessarily convenient if I don't have an Internet connection, but I can get a connection more often than I would ever want to carry around an external drive. Also, I break things.

What I want/need is remote storage. Rice affords me a measly gig of network storage and, honestly, I could do with another 499. But Rice's servers aren't, you know, a long-term solution for me. If I owned both a desktop and a laptop I could buy external drives and turn my desktop into a file host and do all of this myself but, unfortunately, I live in the one computer per Kyle third world. I don't need another computer: I need GIGZ.

Anyone out there have the perfect storage solution they want to tell me about? Or am I doomed to live in hard disk hell, constantly choosing between some 1980's-era Eric Clapton live album and a cliche freshman-year film to delete?