External Harddrive HELP

Hello Apple community,
I recently purcased a Macbook with 120 harddrive, and yes I'm an idiot. I'm doing alot of editing and suprise surprise have run out of room. I was wondering what would be the cheapest and best option in regards to a 1 terabyte external harddrive? Furthermore, does this act as extra harddrive space, or like a USB key so to speak. what I mean is, say if I need 50 Gb of video data off the external hard drive, will it take hours to transfer it from the external harddrive onto my macbook?
Anyone got any answers?

well there is a plethora of options for you.
just use as back up, or storage, or as a bootable disk, each has their own up and down sides. now on a macbook the fastest way to access the external drive will b via the firewire port.
i use mine to store my music files which will be extremely smaller than your video ones. when i want to use a file i transfer it to my mac (sometimes my imac and sometimes my macbook). this i find is the fastest way to work. also if while working i kill the file i know the original is still on the external so its no too bad.. transferring files back and forth is a pain but it helps as back up too. i try and keep all other file types off my macbooks hard drive (pics mp3 videos "these get stored on the external drive") so that there is plenty of space on it for my work.
50 gig will take about an hour to transfer to your hard drive working from the external drive will slow you down. its normally faster working on files that are on your internal drive thats y i transfer to there.
you can setup programs to read files from an external drive to use but if you are using alot of different files at once the transfer speeds may not keep up and your system will slow down.
hope this helps

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Hello,
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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oh sorry, I thought that was where we put the question I am on an extremely tight budget, but since I do shift work, I wanted to use the iCloud funciton to keep my calendars uptodate on my pc/mac mini/and iphone. Wish there were a way to do it for free on my snow and snow leopard OS, but sinc e I cannot, I am wondering about formatting the external harddrive (which I have to purchase). If I format for the snow leopard, will there be a problem re installing the information into the new snow leopard OS machine? Also, I am wondering about the older Mac Pro I have that is the OS before snow leopard (Snow, I believe) will I be able to use this same HD for backing it up to upgrade it (at a later date)?
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