What are you using for external HD?

A file server (desktop) at home, not portable obviously, but wireless accessible. That's for data.

For disaster recovery I have a USB HD.

The LaCie thingy... pretty good and its Tb too

What I'm using

Got the LaCie rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt 1TB and its been sufficient for my 2012 128GB MBA so far. It's partitioned like this:
Bootcamp: 100GB
External NTFS: 650GB
HFS+: 250GB

I haven't tried it yet but I know one can bootcamp from a Thunderbolt interface and intend on seeing how that works soon. "External NTFS" is formatted by Paragon and has all my Steam games data. "HFS+" has a couple Parallels VM's stored and conveniently does my Time Machine backups.

First looked to building my own because an enclosure plus stock drive is far cheaper, but then the support and features of this drive such as Thunderbolt, "rugged" feature which they say prevents serious damage from smaller falls occurring and generally the aesthetically pleasing look of it encouraged me to buy this over other options. It isn't cheap though so what drove me to select this may not be the same reasons you may choose another capacity/feature-set.

EDIT: I have a home file server too but because I bought a portable laptop, I don't expect to always have access to the home server when roaming. My LaCie is undergoing warranty work because of a bad USB 3.0 connector. Having a REALLY good manufacturers warranty that ends in 2015 included with the premium price of this drive (nothing extra) was also nice.

Got all my data saved to the home server until it comes back.

The Western Digital MyBook Essential 3TB - got it for $100 on Black Friday in 2011

It's great, the fans make a bit of noise however (this only becomes an issue while recording audio with the Blue Yeti that picks up EVERYTHING). Costco sells them for somewhere between $120 and $140, it's a great deal at that price.

WD MyBook all the way... So far I have never had a failure with WD (touching wood)..

Hitachi Touro 1TB USB 3

I like the smaller 2.5" drives and also like the fact that it doesn't need a power adapter.

An old Lacie 500GB for Time Machine and a G-tech 500GB USB3 for data.
And it is small and awesome! I skipped all WD and Seagate because of the bad reviews on amazon.

Time Capsule

I'm using a time capsule. It's a absolute life saver because it backs up as long as I'm connected to the network.

trustever said:

WD MyBook all the way... So far I have never had a failure with WD (touching wood)..

Click to expand...

Same here. WD are my go to manufacturer for hard disks.

I use a no name USB 3.0 2.5" caddy I picked up from Amazon for < £10. In that I have a WD 7200RPM 500GB drive. I only have the base 2012 MBA (64GB) using around 50%. Most of my files and virtual machines I access remotely from my home server.

For Time Machine backups I use a Time Capsule.

4 TB Thecus Nas at home. Generally carry a couple of Kingston 120 SSDs or a Hitachi 500 in a USB Caddy for travel storage. I had a LaCie Porsche that I really liked, but drive started going bad in it.