External Hard Drives-Cheap insurance?

My Sony Vaio RS420 is only 1 1/2 years old, yet it's already been replaced by newer Sony Desktops.
In any case, it's been acting kind of funky of late; unexpectedly shutting down for no reason. I decide it was time for some cheap insurance--for all the priceless data that's on the hard drive.

I just received my Seagate ST3400601CB-RK. It's an external hard drive that has 400GB of storage and has both fire wire (faster) and usb 1 (much slower) compatibility. Since my original hard drive is only 120GB, I figure this should be future-proof for a while, and at around $300, it seems reasonably priced. Wow, remember the days when $1/meg was a big deal; this is $.75/gig!.

In any case, it's cranking away at it's first backup; estimated at 2 hours. But once the first is done, incremental backups should take just minutes. Pretty cool.