Cheap as chips
The price of hard disk storage is rapidly declining to the $AU1 per gigabyte level, leading to some odd comparisons between the value of items. For example, instead of buying a Big Mac for lunch, I could get an extra 3GB of storage space for ever (assuming that you buy hard disk space in 1GB chunks). Until yesterday I only had a 20GB hard disk, and its value to me is so much more than the $20 of apparent value.
Speaking of which, I have just taken delivery of a 160GB SATA Hitachi Deskstar hard disk. It seemed to be a choice between it and the Western Digital JD series. The WD had the size I wanted, 200GB (I have no idea why Hitachi does not provide 200GB SATA disks when they have PATA disks of that size). However, the WD is apparently is little slower (which I doubt I would have noticed), a little hotter (which I definitely would not have noticed), and a bit noiser (which I suspect I would have noticed).
The funky SATA cable is a joy to use compared to the old wide ugly flat grey IDE cables. The sooner all drive cables are SATA the better.
Windows 2000 and Windows 98 had no problems seeing the new hard disk, though the Windows 2000 setup needed a driver floppy disk. So, video editing, here I come.