What are the best affordable external drive options for my iMac ?

Hello,
I am a fairly recent newcomer to Macintosh as my primary personal computing platform. I have recently installed Adobe CS4 Design Premium Student Edition on a late 2006 20in iMac and have several important questions about external hard drives. First of all, everyone knows that using any personal computer (whether you its a Macintosh, or a PC running Windows and/or Linux) without an acceptable way to backup critical data is no different than driving in your car without your seat belt fastened. I need advice for a good external hard disk solution for backup and several other important computing tasks given the following realities
1. Contrary to what I to originally thought, I do not have Firewire 800, but instead have access to dual firewire 400 ports in addition to USB 2.0. My concern over connection speed in regards to Adobe's recommendation to use RAID 0 arrays for scratch disks used by Photoshop CS4. Adobe also recommends that scratch disks for photoshop CS4 are assigned on a hard disk that is not your startup disk. Nontheless, Adobe has no objection to use your startup disk assuming it has plently of Free space (and mine does w/ 189.53 GB available)
2. Do really need RAID 0 to achieve the performance I would need? I had prior Mac based training with Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Indesign, in High school. I have not used this software in 4 years and am not only trying to refresh my skills but to learn the software. In other words I am still in the beginner stage With practice and patience, I will certainly learn the software and use it to the best of my creative energies. Given the situation if my work becomes complex enough over time how important is RAID 0 when I make purchase of an external hard disk? I known that the disk utility in Mac OS X allows the user to create a Raid array. This seems like the cheapest way to accomplish the job. However, the purchase of an external Hard Drive must be able to safely backup my system and also provide adequate performance.
3. Speaking of backup, I am one of those users who is still stubbornly clinging to Mac OS X Tiger. However, updating to a new OS has been required ritual for my previous two PCs. That said given that Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard will be out in mere months, I do not see the wisdom now in upgrading to Leopard. After all as a higher education student, money is tight and see Snow Leopard as far more compelling and future-proof upgrade. Snow Leopard is getting better plumbing and will also include Microsoft Exchange Server support (possibly the biggest selling point). I also have interest in using Boot Camp in 10.6 (or 10.5) for running windows software (that are useful for my academics) and games (particularly Half-Life 2 and other Steam games that can run well within my Mac's fairly limited gaming capabilities. If I decide to use Boot Camp I have to partition my internal hard disk. This further complicates finding a very reasonable, affordable, and reliable external disk solution given everything that I have mentioned. Any help is highly appreciated.
Thanks.

I don't think you should worry about the RAID stuff. The only way you could create a RAID is by using external drives, or one those external enclosures with two drives inside. Any speed advantage of such a RAID would be mostly negated by the FireWire 400 connection.
Use your internal drive space for speed critical functions. Use a FireWire 400 external drive for additional storage space, where speed is important but not critical, such as storing your existing media (including your things like your iTunes library files). Use a separate cheaper USB 2.0 external drive for your Time Machine (or whatever method) backup archive, where speed is not that important at all (some people even use a network connection for their Time Machine backup).
You can get a FireWire 800 drive and use an adapter to connect to FireWire 400. The connection won't be any faster on your iMac, but you can use the drive later with a Mac that does have FireWire 800. There are drives that have FireWire 400 and 800, and USB 2.0.
I like the drives sold by OWC
http://www.macsales.com/
I often buy the drive enclosure empty and find a good deal on the hard drive mechanism that I want. OWC sells most of their drives empty. My current Time Machine drive is actually one of these USB adapters
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/U2NV2SPATA/
connected to a Western Digital 750GB SATA drive that I got for about $70. Found that deal through dealmac.com. Couldn't think of a cheaper way to add that large amount of backup space, and it works very well. The internal drive in my iMac is only 160GB, so most of my personal data is on an external FireWire 400 drive; both drives are backed up by Time Machine.

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