Newegg did manage to ship a replacement hard drive. The replacement arrived in a _double_ thickness of bubble wrap. And foam packing peanuts. It was an appropriately sized box and it was the only thing in the box so it did survive in one piece.

Adding that to the other 300-gig (formatted capacity) drive gives me a bit over 1 terabyte of drive space online. I have a spare tray for the two-bay enclosure so I can swap in another few hundred gigs for merely the price of a bare drive (which I wouldn’t get from a certain place… but I’m considering buying a couple of 2-gig SD cards from them since they’re practically impossible to break in shipping. Not that they’re in stock, mind you.)

The first thing I did with the first drive is backup 200 gigs of stuff from the other drives and laptop (full backup, woo!). So I gained redundancy but not much usable space. Haven’t done anything much with the newer drive other than copy several gigs of data to it to make sure it worked. Now I have even more space to spread files around willy nilly. This does nothing useful for organization of said space. I now have two internal 120-gig drives, an external 250-gig firewire, and two external 300-gig drives (rockin’ SATA interface on those). There’s a 60-gig firewire drive I don’t use much because the fan is loud and 60 gigs is such a teeny amount of space it’s barely useful for anything.

BTW I get 60 megs a second transfer speed from the SATA drives. 40 from my internal ATA drives, and 20-30 from the firewire 400 drive. Now that I’ve got a non-trivial investment in SATA drives I’m reluctant to get a non-upgradable Mac when I, erm, upgrade. I’d buy a new 20″ iMac in a second if I could plug in my 600-gigs of SATA goodness (and have two SATA ports left over, even). Looks like I’ll be forced to get a Quad G5 or something. My 4-year old Mac is getting a bit long in the tooth, even with an accelerator (dual 1.2GHz, woot). All the new machines seriously kick the ass of my machine. CPU-wise. Mayhaps some new Macs will show up at WWDC in August. At that point the new machines will be really fast, and the current generation will be cheaper. So it’s a win-win as far as upgrade options go.