External hard drives- recommendations?

[UncleS2]

I've about decided that my Christmas present to myself this year will be an external hard drive- sure would hate to lose all those pictures & other stuff(such as several GB of old-time-radio programs!) if/when the old 80GB factory HD crashes.

The portable ones look mighty cute, but you usually pay more for the same capacity, & dunno why I'd want to carry around a complete backup for my computer- seems a coupla GB on a usb flash drive should do me for now, and already have one of those. Still, if you have good reasons I should get a portable external HD I'm sure willing to listen & learn.

So, I'm looking mainly at desktop external drives. Buydotcom has a Seagate Free Agent 250GB model on sale for $75.99 shipped, 5-yr warranty, normally sells for $100. Since it has more than 3X the capacity of my current hard drive, I figure that's plenty- and for reliablity/longevity Seagate seems to be one of the better-respected brands.

So what do you think- is that good enough to hurry up & buy, or are there better choices in either portable or desktop? Here'a a link to the Seagate deal: http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=204110100&adid=17070&dcaid=17070

 

[SMB]

Seagate is good brand in my opinion.
Take care of the external HDD and it will last for long time. My friend bought the same drive in the link for 100 bucks but it had a 500GB capacity.

Plus the 5 yr warranty is a big plus. If the HDD fails, Seagate will replace it with a new or refurbished unit.

 

[Greggy_D]

Another vote for Seagate. The 5 year warranty blows away the competitions' 1 year warranties.

I have that exact model you are looking at.

 

[SrDriver]

I have a 500 Gig My Book Western Digital and a 320 Gig Maxtor USB drive. They both work well. I have a lot of photos on them + do my system backups on them.

Don't recall what I paid for the 500 Gig but the Maxtor was under $80.00 as I recall?

 

[Crashbox]

I've had success with Seagate as well- I bought a FreeAgent 750GB very recently based on my prior experience.

It's still hard for me to fathom the fact I have a total storage capacity of over a terabyte and TB hard drives are now available...