Chris and I use an external drive to house both of our mp3 collections, and the poor thing is so old and crusty that lately it’s started hanging during almost every simple copying operation we try to do with it. Things got particularly bad this morning, so we decided we needed to replace it today rather than have it die on us. We could restore the files from my iPod if we needed to, but only at the cost of sacrificing our directory structure and naming conventions (and we’re much too neurotic for that). Our requirements were this: it needed to be 120GB or more, around $200, and it needed to do both USB 2 and FireWire. We went to the CompUSA at Columbus Circle and discovered that there was in fact an external drive in stock that met our needs, but with one important caveat: it’s the ugliest hard drive in the entire world. We bought it anyway, but now I’m thinking maybe I should add a racing stripe to my tower, or start modding the cat to match.