The best advantages to this idea are the speed of firewire, the portability of a hard drive in a firewire case, rather than a hard drive in a Dell box. Then there is also the reduced cost to your electricity bill :-)
I cringed when you said that you joined the Dell to the network with a 802.11g wireless card. For a computer whose sole purpose is backups, you would want a faster connection than a measily theorectical max of 54Mbps. I mean, sure, it’s not bad as far as wireless goes, but you are only going to get 2-3MB/sec best case scenario. With a simple Firewire enclosure you’ll get a max of 40MB/sec.
There are lots of different firewire cases you could buy, but I would recommend buying through http://macsales.com aka Other World Computing.
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