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Iomega 1TB eSATA external HDD
I bought one of these from amazon and I am very happy with it. eSATA will give me sustained data rates of 60 MB/s every time I transfer something big, which is twice as fast as what can be expected from a good USB drive.
This is a well made, silent and good looking drive that will give you eSATA for a price that usually only gets you USB while packing a USB plug as well. eSATA worked flawlessly with my Fujitsu Amilo Pi 3560 laptop and is maxing out at about 60 MB/s actual data rates on large file transfers to the drive as well as copies from the drive to the laptop.
Given that the actual HDD inside (a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12) boasts max sustained data rates of about 125 MB/s you can expect to have even higher speeds when the drive is connected to more powerful computers. The 3Gbps theoretical limit of eSATA is of course an illusion since regular HDDs of the latest technology can only catch that in short bursts.
The 1 TB version of the Barracuda actually has 32MB of cache memory which is a better than average number. This drive looks like a good choice especially since my experience with Seagate HDDs has been good in the past and recently. My only gripe is there are better 1TB drives that Iomega could have selected for a "professional" grade external hard drive.
Links:
http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_barracuda_7200_12.pdf
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/04/13/seagate-1tb-7200-12-review/7
NAS
I bought a NAS drive - just plug it into the router and you can access it from anywhere in the house via the LAN/Wifi. I haven't tested the data rates tho.
yeah, had a NAS for years;
yeah, had a NAS for years; twas a RAID-1 setup with two hitachi SATA 3.5 inch drives. It burned up at some point though - the drives are fine. Haven't yet gotten a new housing. These are great for storing your work and media and accesing them over the network. However for large backups (say backup your whole laptop every 2-3 days) eSATA is really great and currently most NAS drives lack that except the high-end ones. NAS drives also tend to be less portable than an external drive. I would say both are needed.
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