I love computer hardware. Especially the pace of improvement in it. I’m referring specifically to notebook hard drives.
About a year ago, when I bought this laptop, the most capacious internal notebook hard drive available was a 120GB 5400RPM drive. I opted for the smaller but faster 100GB 7200RPM model. But last night, I was able to install a new 5400RPM drive that holds 250GB, has a 50% faster data-transfer rate, and sucks up less than half the power most of the time! And it’s quieter too!
Moving my NTFS and EXT3 data to the new drive was a cinch, using the “gparted” partition editor from the Ubuntu install disk. Basically just a matter of copy and paste, though I had to pkill gnome-volume-manager first so that it wouldn’t auto-mount the partitions as it created them. Moving the encrypted partitions over was a little more difficult; I had to create them from scratch on the new drive, then manually copy the data over. Fortunately I’d picked up an external drive case a couple days ago, so I didn’t have to copy things to a different system across the network and then copy them back (this notebook, like most, only has room for one internal drive at a time).
So I can now keep my music collection on my notebook (I didn’t have room for it before), and still have room to breathe, digitally speaking. 
Which reminds me, it’s time to start loading my music disks into it…