You're in luck. You have an Expresscard slot.
In terms of transfer rate and performance, from top down, the
options would be ESATA, Firewire800, Firewire400, USB2, and there
is also Gigabit Ethernet to a NAS box, but that could be relatively
slow compared to local storage. (A lot of NAS boxes for home use,
suck.)
This plugs into your Expresscard slot, and gives two ESATA ports.
That interface standard, is the same one the disk drive uses. It
will run the disk at full rate, with none of the overheads of the
other standards. Chip used is SIL3132. AFAIK, the SIL3132 even
supports port multiplier boxes, so you could control more drives
with a $100 port multiplier box connected to this.
BYTECC BT- ECES2 SATAII ExpressCard 2 x SATA - Retail $27http://
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16839229001
This is an example of an external SATA hard drive enclosure.
It is hard to find enclosures that are kind to hard drives,
and Newegg doesn't have anything better than this one for
a SATA only enclosure. (SATA only, means that you're talking
directly to the drive, and not to an adapter chip inside the
enclosure.)
"PPA 1936 Aluminum 3.5" SATA External Enclosure - Retail" $24http://
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817155223
You can find a lot more enclosures, that offer both ESATA and
USB interfaces on the back. This one is an example. One person's
review claims 51.8MB/sec on the ESATA interface, so I don't know
if that is flowing through an internal adapter chip, or is
getting to access the drive directly. They measured the USB
option and got about 15MB/sec. Both numbers are a little on the
low side, where ESATA sustained should be media limited at
60-70MB/sec, and USB2 protocol overhead limited to around
the 30-35MB/sec mark.
Mapower Map-AE31FSCSJ-01-H-0 Aluminum 3.5" Black USB 2.0 & eSATA External $36http://
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817387029
Finding a SATA drive to put in the enclosure, should be relatively
painless.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148262
Paul