External Harddrive or Hard Drive Docks

I'm interested in getting a hard drive dock to replace my recently failed drive, as I use laptops most of the time, and the idea sounds ideal for data storage and backups.

Do you guys have good experience from them? Any particular make that has useful features and has been reliable? Is it still a good choice if I plan on buying a single big drive and probably not swapping it out for a long time, or would external harddrives be faster and much more practical? The main reason I'm debating it over another external is that it seems to be future proofing as I can easily buy new internal drives as storage space cheapens

I've had a Vantec external dock for a few years and it's worked fine.
Mine has eSATA interface, so transfer rates are as fast as an internal drive.