I was lucky to get a new 500 Gb portable hard drive for Christmas.  It was one of the Western Digital Passport series, a very small USB drive.  I already had 4 of these, 2 with 160 Gb, 1 at 250 Gb and 1 at 320 Gb.  One might think it all adds up to a lot of giga-bytes, but with hard drives, the larger capacity are much more useful than multiple drives that add up to that capacity.

Also laying on my desk are 3 different 2.5 in bare drives that have been removed from various notebook computers, 1 at 160 Gb, and 2 at 100 Gb.  I have an external dock I can plug these into, but what do I use them for?  They are too small to hold an image of my current Mac Book Pro hard drive.  It becomes a bother to split backups over multiple drives.  So they just kind of sit there, like paper weights.

I also have a 3.5 in, 500 GB bare drive sitting next to them.  It failed awhile ago.  It is still under warranty so I need to send it back to Maxtor to get a replacement, but I have not got around to it.  I guess I just have drives coming out the Ying Yang.

My new minimum sizes:

2.5 in drive – 500 Gb
3.5 in drive – 1 Tb