External Hard Drive

My advice, get 2 drives that are between 500-1TB in size, and a RAID external enclosure. Throw the drives in the enclosure, set it as RAID 1, and be happy. External hard drives die, like any hard drive. However in my line of work I see them die a LOT more than normal hard drives. I myself have had 4 external drives die on me in the last year. They can simply be problematic at times.

Thus if you build your own, with RAID 1 you have two copies of all of your data. It will run you closer to $200 but that kind of protection (if your data is very important to you) is worth it.

 

Western Digital would be my recommendation at that price point if you chose not to build it....

Everyone has their own experiences, but I imagine that most of them are positive. Sure, there are these threads about how person x's drive failed and person y wouldn't buy anything but them. I own three drives that there are plenty of horror stories about.

No one would ever post: "I love my Western Digital 1TB Drive", unless someone posts a horror story about one. Companies ship tons of drives daily, not everyone will be perfect.

The best advice is to find one that has a good warranty and excellent customer service. And then avoid reading these threads so you don't lose any sleep.

Or you could be OCD, anal and paranoid like me and have two back-up drives...

More literature found here.
Here, is another thread on 1TB Hard Drives
This one is about LaCie...
Here is another, there is some more discussion about LaCie in there...
Here is one on USB 1TB, I'd stick to Firewire...
And if all else fails, MRoogle

 

To give you more of an idea of what I said:

• Order something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817121042 It allows you to place 2 hard drives inside, then set it to RAID 1 which mirrors the data. Anything you copy to the external hard drive is mirrored onto two drives for data protection if one of the drives were to die
• Order 2 hard drives like this 500GB Drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145215) $44 each after rebate with free shipping.Total cost is around $150 like you wanted, its less overall storage but it gives you peace of mind if a drive dies knowing your data is still safe.

Or do what the person above said which is a very smart, traditional way to backup data. Just remember not to put all of your eggs in one basket (or all of your data on one drive) because if it fails, its gone.

 

What uberamd is a great idea, but, for most people if you are asking generic questions as opposed to which enclosure, usually you are going to take the route I mentioned, but uberamd's way is by far the best for cost, just not something everyone wants to do...