Need help choosing an external hard drive

[Toasted Nanners]

I have a gift card for Amazon and have decided to put it towards an external hard drive for my Dell M1330. I want to use it as a backup device for my laptop and for extra storage, so quality and reliability is my first concern. Small size for easy portability would be a great added bonus, but it wouldn't do me any good if it lost my files, so quality comes before size.

I was originally thinking about a 320GB Western Digital My Passport, but then I had the thought that portable hard drives may be less reliable than one that is full-sized. Does this tend to be the case or is it not an issue? In any case I started looking into a 500GB My Book Home instead but after some research I've come across several reviews complaining of their Western Digital external hard drives dying shortly after the warranty expired.

So now I come to you all as I'm sure I'm much less knowledgeable about these things than many of you. What would you recommend for me? It must be from Amazon and be around $100 - $150. I'd be using it to do backups of my laptop and as extra storage for documents, music, videos, etc.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[SC385]

I'd recommend against anything portable if you are going to be using it as your primary backup solution. Chances are that something would happen to it before something happeded to a larger drive that was left at home on your desk.

I have a few external drives. One is a WD My Book that is about 2-3 years old and is sitll in perfect condition since it doesn't go anywhere. The others are ones I made myself with a reliable drive and a good external enclosure. The DIY route is usually cheaper but in some cases OEM and retail drives don't have as good of warranties.

[Toasted Nanners]

I'll likely wait on the portable until after I have a larger external hdd for my primary backup. Could anyone share the arguments for one over the other when it comes to the WD My Book Home and the Seagate FreeAgent Pro? Does either have any features that gives it an edge over the other? I know the Seagate has a longer warranty but I'd put more emphasis on product quality than the warranty length. How does their backup software/abilities compare? Any other thoughts? Thanks!

[IceBrewedBeer]

I'd also like to hear an answer to this thread. I don't mean to hijack your thread Toasted but I'm also looking for a good external drive.

[Zepher]

I am using a pair of WD 500gig My Books (USB Only), one is about a year old and the other about 6 months. they both work fine, my only gripe is that they changed the design, so now I have two different looking drives sitting on my PC.
I also ordered 2 320gig Seagate FreeAgent Pro (USB, Firewire, eSATA) drives from seagate the other night (it was in the Hot deals section listed as 80gig External Seagate for $20 shipped, there were links to 4 different sizes). these were $47 each shipped.

they'll be here this week.

[Toasted Nanners]

Thanks for the response; I wish I had seen that deal before it ended.

Any other thoughts on the WD My Book Home vs the Seagate FreeAgent Pro?