External hard drive - Portable or not

I'm interested in the pro's and con's of getting a portable external hard drive. It will be going to college with my son primarily as a backup device for his laptop. His major is architecture which involves a considerable amount of CAD drawings and a lot of time spend in studio building models based on the drawings. The laptop is required in some classes as part of the lecture as well as spending a lot of time in the studio.

My original thought was that if it is a backup drive portability isn't an issue and I didn't even look at portable drives. Now I'm starting to wonder if it might be a good idea to have a portable drive. It wouldn't need to leave the dorm room but it might be handy that it could.

Does anyone have experience with portable drives that can speak to their reliability, especially compared to a non-portable drive? Are there any issues with the drives being USB powered?

Specifically, I'm looking at the Maxtor OneTouch 4 mini 160GB and 250GB, and the Western Digital My Book 500GB.

Rick



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