Usually the main reasons I would get an external drive is semi-portability and (I know this is the case with Maxtors) one-touch backup. That's probably what I'd used an external drive for - backup. Otherwise, I love meddling around with hardware in my case. I've got three drives in there right now, and in the future plan on having a lot more/bigger drives. It's not too hard to keep drives organizationally seperate.