The first thing every laptop musician should do with $120 (buy a big internal hard drive)

External hard drives are a pain. If you’re a laptop musician, or if you use your external HDD for anything other than automated backup, you should buy a huge internal hard drive as soon as you have $120 in your pocket.

Seriously, first purchase.

Here’s why:

1. More crap to carry around.
2. Sometimes you won’t have it on you.
3. You need a power supply or two USB ports and a special cable.
4. Which you’ll leave at home, or lose (or live in constant fear of this).
5. One more thing to set up / break down.
6. One more thing to accidentally unplug during your set.

$120 gets you a 500GB internal drive. You won’t have to lug an external to your set, and if you have an older laptop, your computer will just run faster.

On all Macbooks and the new (silver & black) Macbook Pro’s the hard drive is user-serviceable and it’s super easy to switch it out. If you’re nervous any mildly computer savvy friend could help.

On the old Macbook Pro you have to buy a special screwdriver and take apart your computer, but it’s not too hard. I followed this guide and it worked great: Upgrade Your MacBook Pro’s Hard Drive.

On Macs just use your external HDD and Time Machine to backup your stuff and move it over, just like you’d do with a new computer (you’ll need the DVD that came with your Mac too). It’s super easy.

After years of constantly having like 1GB free on my laptop, I finally did it, and it totally changed how I use my computer.

1. I never think twice about downloading something.
2. I’m not always needing to delete stuff.
3. I have all my music and karaoke stuff on me all the time.
4. Set up and break down is that much simpler.
5. Got a free USB port (I only have two).
6. I use my old external drive for Time Machine so I’ll never lose more than a few days of data ever again! When I think of all the awesome stuff I’ve lost from hard drive crashes, lost DVD backups, and stolen laptops it’s boggling.

So yeah, if you have $120, just get a big ass hard drive.