Looking for a 1 Tb external hard drive to back up to and put in a safe reliability is critical and i dont want to pay silly money.

My PC has a E-SATA port and USB3/2

I have looked on Amazon and the prices still seem high and a lot of compliants about failures amongest big brands like western digital

 

a hard drive is never going to be reliable if you really need to depend on it unfortunately.

You can get more or less reliable but nothing i'd ever rely on myself, only properly safe options are DVD's/bluray or magnetic tape as they'll both easily last 100+ years if stored correctly and shouldn't ever corrupt but dvd's are a pain as there just so small, blueray is good but still too small for a proper backup and tapes are really really expensive.

For a home user i'd recommend 2 different hard drives, both different makes/models and store them separately.

 

all prices are still high due to the lack of drives around. prices are falling slowly though.
reliability is a hard one to comment on, i have well had 2 identical samsungs one still going strong, one failed .
have been looking for my next build and western digital blacks seem to be the best option i have found along with the seagate momentus. like above if your really worried burn to optical media and store in jewel cases somewhere cool. have alot of pictures stored this way just incase.
the other way of getting some peace of mind is to have 2 set up in raid so if one dies then you have the other.

 

They will not, disintegration starts from the second you pull it out the drive (non reads can be as little as 8 years), unless you mean he buys a press?

 

I have 6 western digital drives and have for many years, all external. They have been flawless. I move them around regularly and they all work great. I back each one up though frequently.

 

have you thought about online storage? how much data are we talking about?

 

I think you would want to run a RAID set up. Get yourself multiple HDDs and raid them up. You should also have an external that you back up to.

 

http://www.dabs.com/products/buffalo...m_content=Q200

this is the boy you want then, dual 1tb drives that can run in raid 0 or 1 and accessible across network or usb, rolled out a few to work and a few mates, no issues yet in 2 years pretty much.

 

Brendy76 that dabs set up looks good but i think it would stretch my IT skills to set up and get it running properly plus i want to have a portable drive i can back up to and then remove to place in a fire safe against the worst happening.

the current Norton back up file is about 25 Gig

 

the problem is choosing the right drive for the job, having 2 "green" drives in a raid setup has seen one or both drives fail as they dont like to be run flat out, or even as a boot drive. i
still think your best bet would be a western digital OR how about a 128gb ssd. no moving parts so if you drop it accidently its not going to damage the heads or platter ... put into an external case think of it as a huge usb stick..
or even this http://www.pixmania.co.uk/uk/uk/1181...&nopopup=1

 

they are really not that hard to get working from scratch (can be usb or network connected).
If you really dont fancy them then your best bet would be something like a freecom 250gb or 500gb Tough drive, looking at a single 1TB drive is asking for trouble in my experience. (I have a spare 250gb Tough drive btw ) they might be near end of sales life but these things are very well made and come with a rubber silicon jacket to give as much protection as possible, single usb drive and works well.

 

if only 25 gig dropbox or Livedrive it
you could also buy a Blu Ray writer and drop it to a disk, 50 gigs worth