External Backup

With the untimely demise of John's external drive this seems like a good time to discuss backup options. 

Right now my local backups go to a Western Digital USB drive that sits on my desk.  The idea is that if I need to leave quickly (fire, hurricane, flood, etc) I can just grab that one drive and pretty much everything important from the 4 computers in our house (mine, my wife's, file server, and our notebook) is there.  But it's amazing how few photo sessions it takes to fill up a lot of space so this little drive is nearing capacity.

The easiest thing would be to simply add another USB drive to the mix, although I would probably go FireWire in that case.  What I'd really like to do is add some type of network device that takes care of RAID and that I can swap drives out of if one fails.  Although at that point it almost seems like I'd be better off buying a second hand computer in a big case, install Ubuntu, and setting it up myself.  And if I went that way I could setup our network so that all of the active files are stored on that computer instead of in local My Documents folders making it much easier to backup. 

What do y'all use for external storage?  Like it, hate it?  Easy to use?

It's sort of a soapbox issue for me.  A quick power surge or the wrong keystroke and years of files can be lost. 

Every once in a while I'll find old negatives around the house, or at my parents. I've never found an old file in a closet.

I like the idea of just building a backup system from a donor computer. I have one that I was going to sell but I suddenly find myself liking this idea. Memory is pretty cheap now anyways. Not so long ago a terabyte drive was only for big corporations with a massive budget. Couple big drives and a firewire card and I would almost be in business for an at home solution. No need for a fast processor and a big RAM or graphics card. In the meantime I can buy a small Passport drive and just use it to carry around my swap files and digital portfolio pretty cheap.