You may also notice that I dropped a hidden time bomb above – we’ve gotten an extension through Friday!  That means, if you haven’t had a chance yet, there’s still time!  It also means that if for any reason you forgot to register, there’s still a window of opportunity for you to do that until tomorrow midnight!  Only 48 hours (roughly) left, so don’t forget to participate for your chance to win!  Thanks to Drobo for both allowing the extension and for adding a second Drobo to the giveaway.  As a refresher, here’s the contest particulars again:

1. Follow me (@CBJason) and @Drobo (no need to unfollow and re-follow if you already are…)

2. Re-tweet the following text message over on Twitter:

RT I’ve registered to win a #Drobo with @CBJason at http://bit.ly/qdqg6Z

3. Share your best story about why you need a Drobo on the blog here (my blog) and on the Drobo Facebook page! (Note the embedded links… )

4.  Don’t forget to register with Drobo in case your name is picked – if you’re not registered, you can’t win!

5.  All entries must be submitted no later than midnight MDT on Friday!

Keep posting the stories – these are great to read.  As a reminder here though too – I am not picking the winner personally, it’s done by a random drawing from all the registrations.  After drawing two names, these will be cross-checked against the Twitter messages and such, so keep ‘em coming!  Some of the stories I’ve read are quite fascinating, ranging from small business owners running retouching businesses, to poetic story lines, and even PhD students working on some pretty fascinating topics that require massive storage needs.

Western Digital Passport Drive

Well, not only is the second hard drive a great way to increase the capacity of your laptop, but it also saved my bacon this weekend, because when the library was corrupted (I use the method of not importing a copy to my library and save the library on the main OS drive), it was simply a matter of creating a new library when opening iPhoto, changing the option in Preferences to not copy images in, and then sitting back and waiting the hour or so for the import to complete.

What I like about this Passport Drive though is the fact that I have dedicated storage for my photos, music, and documents independent of the OS drive.  I also can easily remove it from the laptop if needed.  Lastly, I also like it because I can expand this fairly easily.  To do that, I would just get another drive, plug it into another USB port, and simply drag-and-drop to copy to the new location.  The old primary can now be easily disconnected, become a back-up, and the new one becomes the primary.  Another great feature of these is that you can easily copy data to and from it, and with surprising ease.  I cannot verify this, but suspect that these Passport drives are solid state drives because they don’t get very hot, and it’s just been so awesome for letting my photos and music libraries expand without me thinking much about them.

The downside?  They are a little pricier than their larger drive equivalents.  With the ever-decreasing cost of storage these days though, it’s well worth the additional 20 cents per gigabyte in my opinion!  (My 320 GB was like $80 – it goes for $71 now at B&H.)  You can get these pretty much anywhere from your local Wal-Mart, to Best Buy, Newegg, B&H, and other retailers/e-tailers.

Oh, and there’s a moral to this story too:  always, always, always…back up your data! For more reviews and other information on this drive, feel free to find your favorite review resource online.  I like the ones over at TestFreaks myself (although this is a rating of the 500Gb unit), but as with any review resource, your mileage may vary.

In other blog notes of interest:

• The Flickr contest is in its final two weeks starting today – it’s a prize package of three pretty sweet items, so be sure to get your entry(ies) in soon.  At stake is a $25 gift card to B&H, the 11th Season of Photoshop User TV, and a book from Photographer/Author, and Friend-of-the-Blog, Matthew Bamberg.  The Flickr thread is linked up at the top of the blog, but here’s a quick link for easy reference.
• Speaking of the links at the top of the blog – you may notice that more content is being added.  The Navigation Bar is being reorganized to include more “About” pages, Archives, My Gear, and much more.  Feel free to peruse those at your leisure.  More content is coming soon too, so don’t just be checking things out in your RSS feeds – lots of content is available directly from the blog!
• Congrats to Mary Angelini as well for her witty comment from the Scott Kelby book giveaway  -  stop by her site for a good set of photo galleries to peruse too (and to congratulate her).

That’s it for today…happy shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow.