External Hard Drive Recommendation

[mithrilG60]

Personally I'd look at buying an external drive case and a new drive instead of buying a pre-canned external drive package. Typically that's the cheaper option plus it gives you the ease of future expansion, just replace the drive later when you need more space or as drives continue to drop in price.

For example you can build a 1.5TB external for $127 shipped with these 2 items @ newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822152175
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817182156

I personally have a pair of these acomdata cases w/ 500gb drives that I use for backing up my home network, one is always connected to my workstation and the other is stored offsite (in my desk at work). My desktop and laptop do nightly backups to a file share on my file server, where I also have recovery images for my desktop/laptop/file server/media server. I then have a robocopy script which automatically copies all the backup copies plus all the shares files on the file server to the external drive every night. Every other Monday I swap the drive at the office with the one at home, that way the absolute most data I can lose in case of a major disaster like is 2 weeks worth.

I don't bother backing up the data on my media server though, 3.5TB is too difficult to backup with a home grade system and I'm not willing to go business grade for data that I can always just re-rip or re-download if it's lost. For just carrying files around I have a 250gb WD Passport that's worked beautifully for years and being based on a 2.5" laptop drive it's much more portable (ie. fits easily in a jacket pocket) than the bigger solutions above and doesn't need an external power source.