A multiforum question, but since it involves laptops

[Hayabusa Rider]

Here is what I want to do. I want to build an external HD drive with very high speed transfer and large capacity.

I have two laptops with 40GB drives. I have a third on the way with 60 gig capacity. I will want to back up all these drives, plus use it for Photoshop and fairly large RAW and TIFF files. Some will be over 50 meg, and I will be doing all this work from my Dell 8500. I would also like to move my games and such to it (HL2 etc).

So far I have selected This PC card

This hard drive

and this enclosure

Am correct in thinking that this should work?

Once hardware is in order, I need to backup the drives. I've not done this before so I'd like suggestions as to software. I assume it would be best to create a partition for each laptop drive, and one larger for general use. Again is this correct?

Thanks.