Re: External Hard Disk Drives: If you should consider one, get one with a large cache. I found out recently from Lacie support the reason my 250 GB drive is so much more quiet, so much faster & so much more reliable is they're built with much more cache than the 160 GB drives. Here's some descriptions of external drives, etc. http://www.computerhope.com/btips/hdd.htm But ignore the advert for Maxtor. I would very definitely not recommend Maxtor. Too many reports of them giving up well before time.