One thing I've worried about is using my work laptop to do my personal chops. With my external image library I was quickly filling up the drive on the thing (I recently got down to only 2 gig free space ).

So as an impulse purchase to alleviate the problem I just bought a portable hard drive to store my personal files (was going to get a 4GB flash drive). Anyway after moving EVERY personal file over (images, downloads, psd's, music, etc.) I still have 66 gigs free. That should hold a few chops.

So far I've been really happy with the drive but now the potential impact of the impulse buy is starting to hit me. I didn't research anything about these types of drives (it seemed like it was a good deal compared to a 4GB flash drive). It appears to be a laptop drive in a USB-enabled housing. Have any of you used one of these drives? I'm wondering about the durability and lugging the thing around in my laptop bag.

Also that shiny black surface is just BEGGING for me to etch a logo in it. Any image suggestions? It would have to look decent in black & white.

Bought the same exact thing also on impulse back in March. Carry it around in the laptop bag all the time. Works great. I do try to be careful about leaving it in hot cars and such, but overall I've been very happy with it.

You should have gotten one of these!

impluse buy or not what u have is the best possible set up for your delima. you may also remove the hd and replace with just about any 2.5 or 3.5 hd, the larger may not fit in the case but if you have a obsolite hd with say 6 gigs thats 6 gigs of chops...mega plus if you own tivo or dish with the usb hook up in the rear, just dont format the hd used in any windows, dont know about mac. you may use to transfer your recorded movies to free up space on your tivo.......ughhh......they say......lol

I have an Iomega HDD 250gig external. It is both USB & Firewire. Editing film takes up space super quick.

I really like it. You can daisy chain them together when you need more. I use pricegrabber . com and check out drive prices and compare... they show how much $$ per gig which is nice, will show you your exact price with shipping (put in your zip code), and it shows if there are any current rebates going. Iomega has rebates frequently. Sometimes you can get a small fee for writing a review for them too.

If I had $5,000 to spare I would have bought a whole new powerhouse computer of my own so that I didn't have to use my work computer!

what i found best for storing my personal stuff like music and photos was a 250 gig portable hard drive that was only like 80 bucks =P

I got 120g hd to backup stuff it is the size of a pocket tablet 2"x3" 1/4" thick and is usb so doesn't need power source, it set me back $90. It also doesn't bear a name just plain little black case. I found it new on Ebay. I wanted the backup in case of the possible main HD crash and the portability. Hope that helps.

Only bummer I've found with the thing, so far, is that the drive can't draw enough power via a cheap, un-powered, USB hub. So I have to devote a port on the laptop to the thing. Problem is that one of my USB ports is flaky on the laptop (dumb dog and a long cable = YANK! at an angle).

So if I'm home I can't use the drive and still use my Wacom at the same time. At least not until I get a better USB hub with an external power adapter (or a new laptop whichever comes first).

I'm seriously thinking of getting a couple of these drives. Use one for chops/flash stuff, one for music, and one for video editing.

please, be aware that HARD DRIVES CAN FAIL, I repeat HARD DRIVES CAN FAIL. Some is just wear and tear, some is just a luck of the draw, and some you can drop on the floor. I've had all three. Whatever you consider dear and personal, back it up in two separate locations (DVDs or spare HDs)
For everyday stuff, I carry around a 1GB SD card (plus I installed a built-in multi-card reader on both work and home PCs.) Prob'ly wouldn't work too good for video editing though I too had a broken USB port on a laptop, bust due to endless plugging and unplugging of a USB drive.

bought myself a nice Portable External 320GB Hard Drive HD to back up my slow old computer, now i have a new computer, 380GB i dont need it, but i still use it all the time, i dumped the whole hard drive from my old computer on it and pull stuff from it all the time, i also store stuff that i dont need but dare'nt delete from this computer on it, it's fire wire so no lag, sometimes i forget which hard drive i'm using

This I'm painfully aware of. The above quote is referencing that I removed all personal files off my employer's computer and put them to this portable drive. Basically this was to keep my work computer "clean" (and keep me from getting in trouble ).

I now have 460 gigs of storage on my home computer. So most of my stuff on this portable drive will probably be copied to that computer eventually. I'd really like to put a RAID controller in the machine and have an array of 350GB drives. But that computer's not worth the effort at the moment (1.3GHz with only 256MB RAM).

Our digital photos get backed up to CD/DVD when I pull them off the cameras/cards. All the music files are backed up on CD's and DVD's as well (and even my daughter's new iPod now).

If I lose anything else stored on this portable drive I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. It's all replaceable (well except the old chops)

For the person that can't afford a Ferrari laptop...

http://global.acer.com/products/notebook/fr3000.htm

You can always get a USB equivalent! (of sorts)

http://www.esend.com/sandisk/Products.aspx?Catalog=Sandisk&ProductID=SDCZX-004G-AD1(Esend)

Turns out my drive is a piece of crap! It just stopped working. Plug into the USB and the light comes on but no drive.

Apparently I'm not the only one either!
http://www.fixya.com/support/p423925-western_digital_passport_wdxml800ue_80

Do yourself a favor and don't buy one. Since I've given up on it I've cracked the case open. As suspected it's a laptop drive. Turns out this one is a SATA drive. I have an adapter at work that can read IDE and SATA drives. So I'm hoping that I can read the drive through that and get my data off of it. Guess I'll know on Monday.

I had one similar WD it also took a crap apparently the plates that make up the hard drive separated. For almost $600.00 I found a place that would read each plate and then put it all back together F%$ck that Just dealt with the loss.
I now use a Shock(drop) proof Iomega 160Gig for all my Photoshop junk. Not sure about Mac but if you have Vista you can format it to NTFS instead of FAT32 which seems to be a little more stable. Also I have Partitioned off 4 gigs of the external Hard drive to use only as PS scratch disc.