re: #3 Charles Johnson
If you don’t want to deal with a bare hard drive, here’s the same drive I linked above in a USB 3.0 case for only $10 more: Seagate Expansion 3 TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive.
USB3 is unfortunately not very mainstream yet, especially if you’re a laptop person.
I picked up a USB3/1394b split box, and that was a dramatically better purchase for me. A fair number of systems are out there with 1394 but without USB3.