To make a top 4 out of external drive connections
1. e SATA, as fast as an internal drive.
2. FW800, very fast
3. FW400, fast
4. USB 2.0, will work but can occasionally have trouble

3.5" 7200rpm indeed.

With modest requirements (trackcount and samplerate) any of the 16MB cache drives will do, even on USB. You might want to balance a bit between price, silence, performance and size. Around 320 - 500GB is where the sweetspots are. I'd definately go with one of the perpendicular recording HDDs now.

[[url=http://[/URL]="http://www.anandtec…"]Here[/]="http://www.anandtec…"]Here[/] are a couple of the latest buyers guides to help you with finding the right drive. There are more storage related articles there.

Good luck.

Hey. I've done tons of research on HDD's. I used to use conventional external HDD's... but in reality, they all suck now. There's really not one company that produces a solid external drive that you can rely on. So I build my own now. It's cheaper, and I've never had any problems. Just buy a good quality enclosure for a 3.5" drive (the I/O magic ones from Radioshack work really well for me personally). Then buy a 3.5" EIDE drive between 200 - 500 GB. Preferably with a 16 MB cache and 7200 RPM. I'd recommend Maxtor, or Seagate (3-5 year warranties). Western Digital is usually crap (plus they only have 1 year warranties anyway), so I'd stay away from all of their drives.

Installation is extremely simple. Also, I would recommend getting 2 identical drives and enclosures, and backing up everything on BOTH drives. Hard drives are the most un-reliable hardware man has ever created... 50% of the time they fail. If you have 2, and one fails and you lose all your data, than you have the other one to fall back on! Replace the failed drive immediately (if it's still under warranty, or buy a new one if it's out of warranty).

Hope this helps.