Models to outperform USB 2.0, FireWire units are expected this year.

External hard drives offer easy and practical storage, but they aren't as speedy as the internal models - yet. Vendors working on a new technical specification say that the first fast, new models of external drives could ship by midyear.
Several of those vendors are offering a peek at their plans at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week.

Read more: PC World.

I can allready see a few threads with people trying to install Windows on external drives.

Are there any plans to move burners to the SATA format ?

I don't understand the "concept" of having an external drive. It's less convenient, it's just hanging around, it can be knocked over.

I don't understand...

"Yoooo duddee!!!"
"What?"
"I got a tite hard drive on my computer!!!!!!!!! oooo shoot! oooshhhooot, my computer's got a hard drive!"
"All computers have a hard drive...."
"eh?"

It's for moving large amounts of data from one PC to another. That was what HDD racks were for in the beginning. USB, Firewire or SATA allow you to do it without having to reboot the machine, that's all.

I don't think anyone in his right mind would use an external HDD as main drive ( I sure hope not ).

Backups, transferring data to another computer.... I use them on a daily basis. In fact, I sell them!

It must be confortable moving your harddrive all over the place and even better with an easy connectivity such as SATA

External SATA drive enclosures have been available for at least several months.

I'm not sure how this can be a new thing.

I see where your coming from XTR. External is a bit silly, but much better off when moving large sums of data around quick(er).