More Storage Space

I've taken a step with respect to my limited local hard drive space and back up woes by purchasing and installing a new 500GB FireWire G-Drive.  The drive is very quiet and half the size of a large Kleenex box--good news for my desk space.  I've set the laptop to back up my person documents to the drive once per week, and to back up my most important files each day to my iDisk space.

The best thing, in my opinion, is that I have off-loaded my entire iTunes library to the drive, freeing up about 15GB of the laptop's 40GB drive.  This means I can no longer listen to my iTunes music on the laptop when untethered from the drive, but isn't that why I have my iPod anyway?  Now I have more than enough space to rip my entire CD collection and sell the discs on half.com, using the money to pay some bills.

For a while, I had been considering Network Attached Storage (NAS) in lieu of a FireWire or USB drive.  However, I decided against it because (a) I am not in a mixed-use environment, and any future sharing of the drive can be accomplished via Mac OS X's built-in mechanisms; (b) I don't currently need any media streaming or other similar exoticisms, as none of my other entertainment devices are up to the task; (c) research led me to believe that the configuration of NAS seems more complex than a true plug-and-play drive; and (d) mounting an NAS server sounds hit-and-miss at best (depending on manufacturer), and I wanted something that would mount seamlessly to allow for automated backups.