Hi.

Just a note about external HD enclosures:

I went the USB route some while ago, but it turned out _way_ to slow. More than about 500KByte/s was rarely encountered, never more than about 600kByte/s. While this is okay for playback purposes, larger copies (like copying a part of my music collection to/from that disk to my Linux fileserver) were annoying at best, playback of ripped DVDs pratically impossible.
I then went for the FireWire route and must say that the extra bucks (for the PCMCIA- and PCI-FireWire adapters, the enclosures were about the same price) were very well spent. Transfer rates aren't any different from those of my internal HDs, be it those in the Desktop or Notebook.
Also, while the USB enclosures need their own power adapter, the FireWire ones can easily be powered from the FireWire cable, so I only need one external AC adapter to power both my external DVD and my external HD, and that one is only needed for my Notebook, the Desktop uses its own AC adapter to also power the firewire units.

cu,
sven