Pine1 wrote:
You might consider an external hard drive of 1 to 4 Terabytes. Good external hard drives are very inexpensive.
Actually, good external drives are still costly, compared to the inexpensive lower quality drives. The drives that make it into the inexpensive externals are usually the lowest quality hardware. An enterprise or enthusiast level drive is probably double the cost of the cheap stuff. Take Western Digital for example - they populate their inexpensive consumer externals with their Green drives - slow, and they use motors that use bearings at just one end of the motor shaft. Warranty is usually 2-3 years. Their Black series, the most robust "home desktop" drive they offer, has a 5 yr warranty, and is intended for a high rate of data transfer, which is a spec that is often hidden from the average consumer, but it will indicate how much data per year it is expected to transfer. It's motor, for instance has dual bearings, one at each end of the motor shaft. While this sounds a bit esoteric, what does matter to you is that the Black is intended for a greater duty cycle, or more constant use, than a green or blue drive. The best and most robust drives from any manufacturer are their "enterprise" class drives, which are intended for RAID arrays and other 24/7/365 applications.
These are usually twice the cost of the bargain drives.
The other issue is heat. Most of the My Book class of portable or external drives use passive ventilation. Heat is the enemy of hard drives.
I generally suggest purchasing a WD Black drive, or better yet, one of their RE drives, and putting them into a fan-cooled enclosure. It is no big deal to do this, and all you need is a philips screwdriver - everything is plug and play and it takes no longer than 2-3 minutes to insert the drive into the enclosure and power it up.
This might sound like overkill, and the low price of the consumer hardware might be tempting. But when the drive fails prematurely - and they do - it will be too late to rethink this.
I have been in the IT business since 1983, and I can tell you, the better drives will give you better service - I would recommend getting a pair. One as storage, and the other for back up, in two separate cases.
Rosewill makes an excellent fan-cooled enclosure - the $27 USB 2 version is this one -
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817173042and the $35 USB 3 version is this one -
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182245Startech offers similar enclosures at comparable prices, but I have no experience with them.
I know this is a bit of a thread hijack, but I needed to provide some factual information on external hard drives.
You get what you pay for, and you never get what you don't pay for. It might seem like overkill, until you lose your data.