External Drives aren't really all that more expensive if you look at apples to apples. The maxtors early in the list are 250 gig models. Basically, external drives are the drive plus an enclosure, power supply and bridge (like IDE to 1394), and maybe some pretty lights and a switch and a cable and software. The cost runs somewhere between $70 (low end, ugly) to $120 (higher end, sweet looking). So if you look at that 250 gig Maxtor external and compare it to a comparable bare 250 gig 5400 rpm Maxtor you see that the case and such run about $110. OWC has a case for $76. With that Hitachi/IBM 180GXP you can make a sweet external 180 gig for about $250. On the other hand, if you have a desktop Mac and use two Maxtors in a RAID 0 configuration, you should be able to beat the 180 GXP performance and size wise. That would be really nice.

Isn't this right angle 1394 cable cool?