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.
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