External Hard Drive Suggestions

I received a comment in my post, Asus EEE PC, a smart cheap laptop alternative saying:

hey jenny ... do you have a recommendation for an external hard drive to get? i'm getting paranoid that my computer will crash and grad school work will disappear without ever getting backed up

I tried responding back in the comments, but my response is too long, so I copy-pasted it as a separate post here.

This is actually something I've done a lot of research on recently. Note that I was researching for external hard drives that could work for either Windows boxes or Macs. First of all, it depends on what size you want. If you want something large, there are many reasonably-priced 1 terabyte hard drives out there. I would describe them as roughly the side of a hard-cover Harry Potter book. They need external power from an AC adapter though. Amazon has the best prices by far. If you want one of these, I would look at the Western Digital My Book or the Iomega eGo. At the time of this post, both are priced at about $210 including shipping.

If you're looking for something more portable to go along with a laptop, the max size is 320GB. I personally just ordered one myself earlier this week, but I have been watching the prices for a while. It seems that every week, they bounce back and forth between $125-129 and ~$155. For this range, I suggest one of three different brands: Western Digital My Passport, Iomega eGo, or Toshiba. The first two seem to be at around the $155 right now, but watch it for a week and it should come back down to the $125-129 number. Now all three of these are powered through USB and not an AC adapter. Note that if you go for a smaller size than 320GB, many of the older versions of these drives require two USB ports to provide enough power (and they provide a Y-cable to do so). The larger, newer drives only require 1 USB port (though you can still use a Y-cable to get faster speeds). The Toshiba is known for much slower write speeds than the other two, but slightly faster read speeds. The Iomega comes with a Firewire port as well, which should be a faster data transfer. All three are extremely portable. Iomega does make cheaper hard drives without the Firewire option, but they don't seem to be as Mac-friendly, which was a concern for me. There are also a number of cheap cases made to carry them conveniently.

Hope that answers kgorm's comment and maybe help others as well!