long-time computer user, comfortable with technology, budget-conscious, an avid photographer, fear hard drive crashes, in favor of LOTS of storage
The External Hard Drive is a good alternative to fitting an extra, internal hard drive. It's much easier to do and for most typical storage tasks performs nearly as well. You pay a bit over the odds for the convenience, but that's to be expected. Even when using USB 2.0, it's this connection that governs the speed of the drive, as it's still much slower than either a parallel or serial internal cable. For many applications, however, it'll still be fast enough.