I was looking at getting one to back stuff up to, rather than putting on DVD.

250GB External Hard Disk Drive with Aluminium Design

each

Well it should be faster than writing DVDs, but just be careful if you only buy one external hard disk. Y'see if something goes pop in the computer and breaks whilst you are backing up then you'll probably lose the backup too. Whereas if you have a couple of backups held on separate DVDs then you'd be fine.

Maybe I'm just a little pessimistic around computers...

I have an additional internal hard disk in my computer.

Nice and simple, no plugging in/power cables etc etc.

Much faster than any external drive.

I use it to backup all the 'My Documents' stuff, pictures, music etc.

The big plus point is the price, you could probably get a 200GB internal HDD for

Stay clear of Maxtor 1 touch ext drives. Pile of crap. The IDE drive inside is fine but it's the overall package that seems to give a lot of trouble.

Does that work out at about

While in Holland for the weekend I picked up this, http://www.mycom.nl/MyCom/Store/productdetailedinfo.do?productID=107060&productType=1

After a recent HD failure which meant me spending a lot of money to recover all my data I bought an external USB HD from PC World specifically for backing up. It was a 80GB Western Digital jobby for

I have an 80GB USB Freecom drive, which works a treat and is plenty big enough for me. Just like other people have already said, I use it for My Documents plus backing-up the C: drive. Had to restore from it a couple of weeks back, and it worked a treat. Transfer speed only really comes into it when I'm opening / saving really big files, and the backup / restore speed is limited as much by how long it takes to create / open the *.bkf file as the actual amount of time it takes to move the file to / from the external drive.

I'd still have got an internal one, given the choice, but the case of my PC hasn't got any space for another drive. As long as the OS isn't on it, it's almost as easy to transfer an internal drive from one PC to another as it is an external one, so ease of transferring the drive to another PC doesn't really come into it when deciding internal over external. I'd only recommend backing-up to removable media (DVDs, etc.) if you're going to keep the backup somewhere separate from the PC (i.e. backing-up to protect against fire or theft, rather than data loss)

IMHO, anyway...