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You know, when I got a MacBook with an 80GB hard drive it seemed huge. But after about five minutes of BitTorrent shenanigans, I realized my naiveté. I also realized that offloading files, especially music files, to an external drive is problematic.
The point of a notebook is portability, and hooking up a USB drive just to listen to podcasts in the kitchen (what can I say, Danny, Jose and Dylan; your soothing voices stop the mayonnaise splitting every time) is a pain. What I need is something like Maxtor's Central Axis, a one Terabyte NAS (Network Attached Storage). It has a gigabit ethernet connection to keep speeds up near those of a local drive, and two USB ports to add further storage when you need it.
And even if you are not hooked into the network via CAT5, you can still get your media wirelessly when whipping together eggs and oil in the evening (via a Wi-Fi router). It'll even stream movies to your X-box or PS3 without a computer in between. The price is a not unreasonable $330, available July.
Product page [Maxtor via Uncrate]
