Re: External Hard Drive Recommendations
 

My experience is that drives most definitely fail more often than in early days when they had much reduced capacity. It occurs to me that it is such an obvious question, there is bound to be data out there, and a quick Google found multiple links:

Study: Hard Drive Failure Rates Much Higher Than Makers Estimate | PCWorld
Google’s Disk Failure Experience
Hard Drive Failure rate by manufacturer? - Hard-Disks - Storage

(way more out there)

I can remember a drive failing in a lab workstation before I retired, which would have been >20 years ago. We had sufficient warning to rescue the data. other than that, I think I might have lost a drive in one of my systems way back, but am not entirely sure. More recently I have lost two of the ten drives in my current system in just over a year, and one of those was a 1st generation Velociraptor, which supposed to
among the most reliable of HDDs. I wouldn't dream of trusting data to a single source nowadays. Not for a moment!

[edit] having just read my own links, the Google study (second link) is particularly interesting. For instance they found no correlation between HDD temperature and failure rates. I can remember a few anecdotal supposedly true stories about drives you probably wouldn't trust as forts choice. The Hitachi Deskstar drives that became known as Deathstar drives on the forums comes to mind. Seagate were thought to be more reliable than Western Digital drives not so long ago, and both my failures were with WD drives. Hard data has to be king in these situations though.

Re: External Hard Drive Recommendations
 

the failure rate of other equipment is also disconcerting as well as expensive and a pain in the butt.
as well as the hard drive failures i've had:
Dell U2410- pink tint, but bought for CC.
iMac 17" screen lines.
Lacie firewire lightscribe burner-fail.
smallHD DP6- power failure/warranty repair.
API A2D- power button broken on brand new shipped unit.
iMac superdrive fail.
Matrox mini- does not calibrate monitors for CC as advertised, the reason i bought it.

i understand that working in this field with a lot of high tech items that problems happen... but product failure and design flaws on items that cost so much hard earned money is really frustrating, and looking on many forums to solve my own problems, it seems that they are more the rule than the exception (ie: look up screen problems with many different iMacs!). i wonder if standards are lower on everything? and don't get me started on the difficulties of dealing with apple or dell or lacie or matrox who often refuse to accept responsibility or make amends.
or maybe i'm just a whiner...

Re: External Hard Drive Recommendations
 

I hear you there; that and buggy firmware/drivers/software.

LG 24" LED LCD monitor, DOA
Seagate 802.11 1TB HDD failed
two WD Black 500GB HDD's failed
Datavideo DN-60 HDV to CF recorder (all firmware related issues)
GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD5 failed after 1 month, replacement was DOA, switched to ASUS
Sparkle GTX 2xx was DOA
HP Lightscribe DVD burner screwed up several dozen discs
Anything by Belkin is a nightmare
Manhattan LCD 8.9B backlight failed
Apevia Aqua 700w PSU power switch broke; replacement ran under 3V and 12V
-Apevia then sent me two replacement PSU's, so i wired them together and use both in the HAF932

Had better luck with Samsung monitors and HDD's over LG monitors, and Samsung HDD's over WD's. The MyBook series randomly drop out or shut off, though the drives themselves are fine. I ripped them all out and made them internals or nude externals.

Also Adobe CS5.0 was the most stable release on my machines; 5.0.2 was TERRIBLE, skipped 5.5 and so far 6.0 has been only decent; keeps switching scratch disks to C instead of RAID array every startup.

The MyBooks cost less than the WD drives bare; which is insane.