Last November I wrote about the then-new line of iBook G4s and my newfound lust for upgrading. I even went so far as to put my trusty PowerBook on ebay to see what I could get for it: Had the high bid come in a few hundred dollars higher, I would have said a fond farewell to my TiBook and a grand hello to a faster and sturdier, if smaller, iBook. Alas, the market didn't bear out for me and I realized that 500 mhz of G4 power could certainly tide me over for another year or so.

Of course last week I had to go and drop my PowerBook on the hardwood floor in my living room and the term "forced upgrade" almost became a new part of my vocabulary. The case cracked in two places (along the lighter grey plastic around the headphone jack and under the screen) but no internal damage was done. Maybe it was my TiBook's way of letting me know the iBook ain't so tough, after all.

What I didn't spend on upgrading to a new computer I decided to put towards making my machine a little more useful. Staring up at the bookshelves that line the wall next to my desk, I realized that my stuff had long ago started taking over my girlfriend's half of the room. A full two shelves were taken up by CDs I hadn't listened to literally since I put them up there last summer -- it's not that I don't listen to music, but just that nearly all of what I listen to these days comes from an .mp3 or AAC file on my Mac or iBook and not from a CD player. Both stereos in the apartment have patch cords permanently attached to them for easy iPod access, and its a lot easier to find a particular song by scrolling for it than by trolling through shelves and shelves of jewel cases.

So I decided it was time to consolidate my music collection. No, I wasn't about to get rid of any of the music, but rather it was time to digitize all of those CDs so I could put the jewel cases in storage and give back the shelf space they'd so unjustly been taking up.

(Okay, truth be told, I guess my girl's telling me to "get my stuff off!" of her side of the shelves maybe had something to do with my deciding to mend my ways ...)

A few days' worth of online research and one trip to CompUSA later, I had the makings of a spacious new 160 GB firewire hard drive for around a hundred bucks. I'm not a big fan of CompUSA, Starbucks, and other mega-chains, but it was on sale and a deal's a deal, so I scored myself a 7200 RPM, 160 GB Western Digital EIDE drive for $59.99 after rebate. (This sale's since ended, but similar deals can be found nearly all the time at Staples, OfficeMax, and the like). A trip to dealnews yielded a sale on 3.5" enclosures at PC Micro Store online, and I picked up an IDE to Firewire enclosure, complete with Oxford 911 chipset, fan, power supply, and Firewire cable, for $36 (plus $7 shipping).

Pre-made firewire drives aren't hard to come by, but for literally ten minutes or so of your time, you can save a pretty penny. A quick search through dealnews just now found two pre-made drives comparable to mine available for about $70 more: The LaCie 160GB 7200 rpm Firewire Drive is a particularly good buy right now at $167.50 including shipping from zipzoomfly.com. Personally, ten minutes of my time is worth sixty-seven dollars, but that's just me.

Truth be told, I had actually already wasted a week and a few bucks' worth of shipping charges on a combo USB 2.0/Firewire case and USB 2.0 PCMCIA card from meritline.com. I can never resist the lure of something new, and that iBook G4 would have had USB 2.0 ports standard. Of course, it wasn't meritline's fault I didn't read the fine print about the adapter card needing a PS/2 port for power, and they were very nice about refunding my money. But after that I decided that sticking with Firewire was an easier road to travel.

Installing an IDE drive in an enclosure is as easy as connecting a cable, screwing the drive into place with four screws, and popping the various plastic components of the enclosure into place. My favorite part is reading the instructions: invariably they include a full page or two about driver installation for Windows users and a sentence to the effect of, "Mac users may simply attach the drive to their computer using the included cable. The Mac system should mount the drive without the need for any additional drivers."

Sure enough, my drive mounted without a hitch. I used Mac OS X's Disk Utility application to partition the new drive into five equal size chunks, and that was that. It was time to pull those CD's down, fire up iTunes, and dust off those shelves.

A week later I've got about 25 CDs turned into AAC files and 142 GB or so of free space left to fill up with music from hundreds more. And my new Firewire drive takes up the same amount of shelf space as maybe five of those CDs. It's a little weird to think about, all of that music digitized into such a small space. But then I stop thinking about it and start listening to that Marvin Gaye album I haven't heard in years because I only really like three of the songs and it was always too much of a pain to find the disc in the other room for only three songs.

Soon enough I'll get one of those new fangled wireless media server things for the living room stereo and then I'll be able to stream music from that new drive to the other side of the apartment. Or maybe I'll just wait until it's time to get one of those new iBooks -- or a PowerBook G5, when they come out -- and keep my TiBook around as a high-powered jukebox.

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Noah Kravitz is an educator, musician, and writer who calls Brooklyn, NY home and takes his iPod with him everyday on the commute to work at a school in Spanish Harlem. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Teaching and Learning with Technology and the drummer for Automat, who can be found rocking various clubs in the five boroughs and beyond.