Wow, I was way off on what Cardbus meant!

I just checked my notebook and it has two Texas Instruments PCI-1225 CardBus Controller (each has a slot on top of one another). Am I right to assume that most modern notebooks (this one is about 18months old) would have this?

I was looking at just getting a mini tower and popping some drives into it... but I will probably be doing most of my "backing up" at work, so I need something portable.