NAS, eSATA, Internal, External? Help

[chipperhead]

Never really looked into Hard Drives much before and now I'm flummoxed.
Currently got a 160Gb Sata Drive in my PC and looking for more storage and also a way to regularly back up certain files e.g, pictures and documents.

I access the internet via a Router and I also have a laptop connected, I also quite often download large files onto my pc and then transfer them to my laptop to take to work.

Initially I thought about getting a 500Gb internal, using this as my main drive and using my current 160Gb as a second internal drive to backup but wondering if there is a better solution.

Would the advantage of using NAS be that I wouldn't have to have my main pc on to transfer files and also if I had a power surge and it blew both my internal drives the NAS would still be ok?

 

[rpstewart]

The only advantage that I see a NAS having is the ability to connect to 2 machines simultaneously. If you take your file transfer example a NAS won't really help, you'd still download on the desktop and save to the NAS then go to the laptop and copy from the NAS to the local disk.

Unless you have a compelling reason to use a NAS I'd suggest that a plain external drive is a better bet - the performance is better and they're cheaper.