Putting the spare 3.5" SATA hard drive we had laying around, into a nice external enclosure, was easy and economically the right thing to do. In External Harddrives Pt1, we pointed out the importance of looking at the drive's power requirements and comparing that with the enclosure's power supply parameters. One week back in service again, the now nicely enclosed Seagate ST3250823AS SATA drive has been working great so far and is used by Mac OS X Leopard's new integrated backup program a.k.a Time Machine.

I really like the looks of the black Acomdata Samba USB Enclosure but it's kind of big, considering that sits right next to a Mac Mini. Also, the required 12V AC wall-adapter makes this a pretty much stationary device, not suited for moving around a lot.

LaCie Portable Hard Drive
Instead, a really cool and portable external hard drive is the LaCie 160 GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive. The compact (3 x .65 x 5 in / 76 x 17 x 129 mm ) and very lightweight (6.35 oz / 180 g ) device houses a 2.5" 5400 rpm hard drive. This is arguably the best looking external drive but what's even better is that there is also a FireWire 400 (up to 35-40MB/s) version available.