I noticed on the seagate site that they have an

outlet area kinda like dell.  They have 1.5tb usb2 drives there for $89 among other things,might be  worth a look for you.

http://shop.seagate.com/store/sgateus/Content/pbPage.OnSalePage

The Fantom has been mentioned.  I have the Fantom Greendrive 1tb, and its great so far.  It runs pretty quietly and has good speeds with my eSata cable.  It also comes with the 3-year warranty which is a must for an external drive. Also like Barry said, if it breaks its got an easy opening and its just a plain drive that you can plug into your computer.

 

Western Digital Elements is also good, if you want the most basic.  Its juts a big black box with some ports in the back.  No software, no flashy graphics, nothing.  But all the reviews say its quiet, fast, and sturdy; all the things that make a good drive.

Western Digital Elements is also good, if you want the most basic.  Its juts a big black box with some ports in the back.  No software, no flashy graphics, nothing.  But all the reviews say its quiet, fast, and sturdy; all the things that make a good drive.

A friend had a Fantom that stopped working.  Turned out it was the connecting electronics and I was able to open it and take the hard drive out and get his data back.

Good luck.  Just like regular hard drives these days, I suspect sometimes it's the luck of the draw.

barryzee

Easy set up and use. Sits on my network and does what it says on the tin. Potential for remote access (not tried -yet- as no current requirement).

If (when ) I upgrade though it will be to something with RAID capability – healthy paranoia …if it can break it will - (maybe WD MyBook II ???)  …. just couldnt afford it at the time

As drive capacity has increased, so has the potential for data loss on a huge scale. For that reason, I continue to stay well clear of large capacity drives, preferring instead a liittle collection of smaller drives (in my case, 3 x 250GB and 1 x 320GB). 

Go on then, folks. Tell me I am paranoid. . .

You're paranoid. 

I'm not paranoid (even though I *know* they're watching me. . .) but where any HDD is concerned, I tend to worry about eggs and baskets, i.e., all of the former in just one of the latter.

Drive failure is not particularly rare and though according to Internet comments, those from some manufacturers have a worse track record than others, it's still pretty much the case that either you're lucky. . . or you're not.

As drive capacity has increased, so has the potential for data loss on a huge scale. For that reason, I continue to stay well clear of large capacity drives, preferring instead a liittle collection of smaller drives (in my case, 3 x 250GB and 1 x 320GB). This allows for redundancy in that a back-up of video, images or music can be written to one, two or even three drives in the case of highly valued data.

A friend of mine  bought himself a 1TB external drive aropund 18 months ago -- against my advice. I wondered how long it would be before it failed. Well, so much for my advice: the drive is still working fine. And yet, and yet: I'm still nagged by the thought that depending upon just *one* larger external drive, and without any redundancy, is an unnecessary risk.

Go on then, folks. Tell me I am paranoid. . .

Also, the hard drive you're buying is measured in TB, not TiB, which means it will tell you that it's 937GB when you plug it in (computers measure in *iB and call it *B). 

Confusing? 1TB=1000000000 bytes.  1TiB=1073741824 bytes.  How is this? Here's how:

1000B=1MB, 1000MB=1GB, 1000GB=1TB while 1024B=1MiB, 1024MiB=1GiB, 1024GiB=1TiB.  It's confusing.

That said, where are you getting these statistics?  I couldn't find info for either of them

->Under "Specs" tab.

Karen's link you just scroll down to "Tech Specs"

I knew there was something suspicious about the lowercase "b" in Mbps as opposed to MBps. Thanks for the clarification. Looks like I'll be getting a WD 1TB. Thanks for all your suggestions.

For basic storage I recommend the  Western Digital My Book Essential which i password protected so nobidy can access it except you.  Read the reviews on Amazon though.  People wanting it for advance use prefer the regular WD My Book.

Thanks, there's also one on Amazon, WD 2TB for $99. This one is only usb2.0 compliant, but it reports transfer rates of up to 480Mb/s, while the Fantom drive reports 150MB/s max on its eSATA. This confuses me, because I thought eSATA would be way faster. Or am I reading something wrong?

 

http://www.amazon.com/Western-.....038;sr=1-1

That said, where are you getting these statistics?  I couldn't find info for either of them

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Elements-External-WDBAAU0020HBK-NESN/dp/B002QEBMCI/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1294682493&sr=1-1

http://www.buy.com/prod/fantom-drives-g-force-black-2tb-esata-usb-2-0-hard-drive-with-3-year/q/loc/101/217593422.html

@Casey: Yea, portability isn't really that big of an issue. But I'll stick to WD since everyone seems to have had a good experience.

@karen: From my research, Maxtor seems to have a bad reputation with their external HD's, and now it is part of Seagate (correlation?). Also, another interesting thing I read is that after 1TB, the chance of a HD failing increases significantly (up to 30%). Just thought that was interesting, though may be untrue.