Most Reliable external HD?

If you can wait maybe about 6 months or so, by then SSD drives (solid state drive means no moving parts) are coming down in price. As of right now a 64 GB which I know is pretty small is about 135 bucks. These prices will come down of course very soon I suspect. They come in the SATA form so you can pop them in your pc or buy a hardrive case for them. They have a MTBF rate of ONE MILLION HOURS, over 100 years if you leave them on. Of course no one has been around to see this yet but better failure rate than regular hardrives for sure. I'm waiting for them to come down and hopefully pick up a 500 gig. Something to think about anyways.

http://ncix.com …index.php?minor​catid=1275

I have a multi tier system
All my photos are on my Drobo. I LOVE it. 4 drives, mix and matched in it's raid. right now 1 750 gig, 2 1TB and 1 1.5 TB drives.. all western digital.
Monthly (Or after a big photo trip) I mirror the Drobo to:
a 1 TB Western Digial My Book that I leave powered off unless I need it.
and
a 1.5 TB 3.5" Internal Western Digital hard drive that's kept either at work or in the Bank's Safe Deposit box.

I have had good experience with WD, but the best advice came earlier. Whatever you use make sure you have a reliable backup plan.

carloman wrote in post #9968760
If you can wait maybe about 6 months or so, by then SSD drives (solid state drive means no moving parts) are coming down in price. As of right now a 64 GB which I know is pretty small is about 135 bucks. These prices will come down of course very soon I suspect. They come in the SATA form so you can pop them in your pc or buy a hardrive case for them. They have a MTBF rate of ONE MILLION HOURS, over 100 years if you leave them on. Of course no one has been around to see this yet but better failure rate than regular hardrives for sure. I'm waiting for them to come down and hopefully pick up a 500 gig. Something to think about anyways.

I'll second this! Spinning platters with heads floating on air bearings type hard drives WILL fail, it is only a matter of time. SSD's are the way to go, especially if you don't work the dickens out of them. Even SSD's will eventually fail, as they are rated for a number of write cycles, but as mentioned in the quote above, a lot better MTBF than conventional hard drives.

Another vote for Western Digital. I have 3 of them and they've never failed or given me any problems.

Every drive manufacturer makes a myriad of different capacity and speed hard drives, not to mention MTBF design specs. The best bet is to gather user data from sources such as Newegg. Most drives purchased by consumers nowadays are SATA. However, for industrial-duty, high MTBF, 24/7 use, can't beat a SCSI drive. It boils down to purchashing a drive or drives commensurate to the value you put on your files. As mentioned previously by a post, personally going to wait until SSD prices are reasonable. Here again, there are quality/speed levels within SSD drives.