What external hard drive is best?

For internal drives at least, a lot of people avoided Western Digital for years because they had a horrible reputation for reliability, personally I'd avoid them for that reason, all external hard drives are just internal drives (usually from the same manufacturer) ready-housed in a case. With external drives you can waste like hours and hours reading pages of reviews and it seems everybody has had problems with every manufacturer though so the brand probably doesn't matter too much.

The small drives like passport drives don't need an external power source, the bigger ones will do though, they will need plugging into a wall power socket. If that's not a problem just go with whatever's cheapest for the size you want. You can get 1TB (1TB = 1000GB) drives for under £60 now.

Backup isn't really too important as there's plenty of programs you can download for free that will help you do it. I think Windows 7 has a backup wizard built in, if you have an older version of windows you can download Microsoft synctoy for free: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyncToy. I've used that for making backups before, but there's probably better software that's specifically designed for backups as well that might be easier to set up.

There are some things you can do to save space. If you have all your music on an mp3 player like an ipod, you don't need to worry about keeping a backup, as if either your PC or iPod breaks, you'll always have a copy of it on the other. You can actually copy music from an iPod onto a PC if necessary (iTunes really doesn't want you to think so, though...). Just deleting stuff you don't need, if you haven't done it already, like bad/blurry photos and music you never listen to (use the play count/most skipped count/etc in your itunes/media player program) can save a ridiculous amount of space.

Which make is down to personal preference and hearsay. I've used many Western Digital drives for years without any problems. In the last 11 years I've only experienced hard drive failures twice, once on a Seagate and the other a Maxtor. So make isn't really important.

You want something of at least 1TB. Plus one that has the fastest connection method. That will depend on what your computer supports. If it's USB 2.0 then OK. If it has eSATA then that will give you much faster transfer rates.

There a quite a few that include backup software like this one for example

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Essential-...

You sound as if you want a network attached storage device. The one that I would use is the Seagate STAM1000100 FreeAgent GoFlex Home 1TB NAS - 1 TB, USB, PC/Mac. It can be connected like a usb drive and will be able to backup a large amount of data. This unit has a hard drive included inside of it so there is no need to worry about changing it. This unit is not the cheapest of units but it is not an expensive either as it costs roughly $140.00 from www.tigerdirect.com.

Product URL: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTool...

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