External Space for laptop

[xmmsJapanese]

Dear Gentoo users,
I am currently planning on leaving the country within the next two months. I will only be able to bring my laptop with me and I will be there for a year. I was wondering what would people suggest to increase my hard drive space. I currently have a lot of hardrives for desktop computers and am a little sad i wont be able to bring my desktop with me.

There are a couple options I have looked into but I'm curious on what the knowlegable communitys opinions are.

1) The best option looks like a external usb hd case. Sadly, i dont have firewire on my laptop. They appear to cost $35 ish on new egg. I was wondering if users have had success with these devices and what brand I should purchase? Also I was wondering what kind of speed user are getting out of these devices. I have usb 2.0 on my laptop. I was also wondering if my bios doesn't support booting from a usb device whether grub might allow me to still boot from the usb device?

2) I have thought about buying a replacement hard drive for my laptop. Right now its a 30gig hardrive in the laptop. That appears to be very expensive and I woudln't have another laptop to put my 30 gig hardrive in.

3) I have thought about a general external usb hardrive. Those are very expensive and would also be on usb.

Does anyone have any opinions??

Thanks for your time.
_________________
Toshiba Satellite A-15 S-1292
*Celeron 2.4 GHz model
(pentium 3 setting under kernel)
*intel chipset 82852/82855(852gm)
*512 mg of 2700 ram(expan. to 1024)
*i810 intel sound chipset:'ALSA'
*CD-RW: 24x,DVD-ROM: 8x
*15.0 in. active-matrix dsp.

[inode77]

Buy a new 2.5'' harddrive for your laptop and a external usb 2.5'' metal case.
I use a Cutie 2.5'' (IEE1394 + USB2 iface) case and a 40GB drive with 4200rpm and <=500mW power consumption so I don't need external power to use the drive.