External Hard Drive Saves Space and Time

The Maxtor 1394 Hard Drive is an external, portable hard drive that can plug directly into any PC with a 1394 port (aka FireWire connection). The "1394 port" is simply a name for the high speed input developed by Sony, Apple and others to provide much more speed than the now-standard USB connection to your computer. It is good technology. In fact, the 1394 port allows data to be transferred up to thirty times faster than via USB. This means that when you play a video from your hard drive, it's not jerky looking.
Great for editing movies on your PC, external hard drives are also a perfect place to store the kids' latest computer games. Games are memory hogs, and saving games to an external disk drive is one way to keep them around and not bog down your computer. I use the drive the other way around, storing photos (and other information I don't want to lose) on the removable drive (and unplug it from the computer) when the kids want to mess around with the PC.

Maxtor now has two portable external hard drives on the market: a 40 GB model that costs $279.99 and an 80 GB model that retails for $399.95.

P.S.: If you don't have the latest PC, it is relatively easy to install a 1394 PCI card into your desktop machine. They sell for around $50.