Im potentially in the market for an external HD.

At the mo, I dont really have anything backed up, which is a bad practice for any PC owner. My cousin has a little 1TB HD thats small and compact (approx 12 x 8 cm). To be fair, 1TD is a tad excessive for me. I dont have vast amounts of video / photos and music. 250 GB would be ok.

Anyone have any advice?

I'd like something mid-range. Reliability is key. I've had shit luck with flash drives and similar stuff int he past. They seem to crap out on me.

You've had bad luck with flash drives, are you serious? Because a flash drive is about as reliable as you can get... no moving parts, all solid state. If that's the case, I recommend you walk away from any single point of failure.

Regarding your backup strategy... are you planning on keeping a copy of your documents or whatever on your pc and on the backup drive? Or backup drive alone? If the latter, that's not a backup strategy. You want to be safe? Burn 2 DVDs with your data. Store one in a fire safe in your house, store another off site somewhere.

If you really want to use a portable hard drive, you may as well get a 1TB. The prices of hard drives are virtually in free fall... there's no reason not to use a gigantic one. Consider it future proofing. If you have multiple PCs, you may want to get a NAS (network attached storage) with a network card and all those niceties. It drives up price a big, but gives you a bunch of neat options. You also have the option of going with one running RAID, though in reality RAID isn't going to help you much. If you want to go to the point of RAID, build a computer as a file server with a RAID 1 or RAID 5 array. That, of course, is expensive.

As for brands, I'm a fan of Western Digital. Not so much of Maxtor. I'm ok with Seagate, not so ok with Hitachi. Of course, my likes and dislikes may not have any basis in reality any more, just historical experience.

I dont need a fort knox backup strategy. I'm too lazy for DVD's, especially since I may be updating the drive every week or so.

Okay WD, gotcha.

Seagate would be my first choice. But beware of the seagate maxtor thingy. I think they have some kind of joint business deal with some disks. I've had one maxtor disk crap out on me.

Yea, I had several maxtor disks crap out on me, thus no trust. I used to trust em.

Hey Derf, if the whole point of this is to save your files from being lost, putting all your files on the external drive and nowhere else isn't going to accomplish that. You need a secondary copy somewhere, even if it's on your regular computer hard drive. Otherwise there's no point.

No, i will have 2 copies. Master on the actualy PC HD, then once every month or so copy over that crap onto the external HD. So one day, if my PC dies, I can format and paste the files back onto the PC from the extarnal HD.

Obviously, the external HD will be removed from the PC once the backup is done.

ok, that's good. Be sure to test it regularly. It would suck to lose your primary pc, format it, plug in your external and it died a quiet death.