External hard drive advice sought

[SilverBuffalo]

I've been following Grif's thread on adding a bigger hard drive with interest as I've used up 85 of my 120 gig unit,
mostly music and pictures,

my question is regarding an external USB connected hard drive,
I can think of a few advantages like using it on both my desktop and laptop,
retaining my files should my system crash etc.

Are there any disadvantage (as opposed to a built in secondary hard drive) that I should be aware of, any recommendations?

When I typed external hardrive into Ebay I got 5000 hits, with a hundred gig units starting at $50, is it really going to be that cheap and simple to "solve" my lack of space problem?

[cfell]

Let me be the first to be corrected.

Yeah.. external drives are an excellent solution. "Throughput" tho can be slow compared to being wired into the system board ... But, yeah, it can be that easy.

[DanMartin]

I have been buying them off of Sam's Club auction site. 320GB Maxtor for about $50-60.
Using them to store pics and do backups.

dan

[Razmataz]

I personally wouldn't recommend anything less than a 750 gig hard drive these days. There's not that much price difference for it vs. smaller drives. In fact the last one I bought was a 1 terrabyte one. Then you won't have to delete anything! :)

[dwsdad]

You might want to do some research to make sure you PC can access larger drives. Some of the older PCs can't go above 120Mb. But, yeah, it's gonna cheap and it's a good way to expand your system. I have 3 external drives on my system. 2 are going through a Netgear NAS and the other is just direct connect to the PC. The 2 networked drives are accessible from any system on my network, and I don't have to keep a PC going to get to them.

[mtrevelino]

I am running Vista and have two internal drives and use one external drive. I use my drives as follows:
C/D (one drive) C partition is 80GB for system files. D is 20GB for "My Document" files.
E is a internal 300GB drive that I store 170GB of music files and backup files from C/D.
My external drive is 250GB and every couple of months I will copy the backups from my E drive.
With external drives being so cheap, I purchased an additional 250GB drive in which I copied all of my music files and have them playing at work.
The backup system that I use is ezBackup. The link is as follows:
http://ajsystems.com/eazybackup/ezb.html

[BrianV]

We are in the IT business, and have found the Seagate Free Agent USB drives to be the fastest and most dependable. We have used a bunch of the 1.5 TB Xtreme drives for complete system tansfers and database migrations. They are a little more $$ than the others, but....

Shop around, but for easy reference:

CDW #: 1458068 1TB, or
CDW #: 1568276 1.5 TB Xtreme

my .02

-Brian