OT: Buying a new computer, need an external hard drive
It all depends on the size of the data you're backing up. If you're just backing up e-mail and a few pictures, then a flash drive will work. You can get them fairly cheap up to about 4 gb. Next step up is USB powered hard drives. I just got an I/O Magic 120 gb drive for $99 and a $20 rebate from Circuit City. You might be able to find it cheaper elsewhere. Try New Egg. From there, you have USB external hard drives that go up to 1 terabyte. That's a gigantic amount of storage that most home users really don't need. Kind of like getting the big tires on your truck, and then never taking it off road. 120 gigs is a good size to start off with, as the average person's hard drive is 100 gb, and you'll have more than enough room to actually completely back up your hard drive. Again - speed, seek time, etc are all kind of a moot point for just doing backups. It's all going over the USB connection, so speed isn't going to matter - your USB connection is faster than any external hard drive out there. An interesting note on USB drives - they have USB flash drives (thumb drives, whatever you want to call it) that are "U3 Enabled". Which means you can run software directly from the drive. Firefox, Open Office, a bunch of other stuff that you can use for e-mail, etc without leaving a foot print on whatever computer you're using. Very slick. Anyhow - good luck.
