Like most folks, I too have experienced meltdowns with my external drive. I have a 160GB Maxtor which is super fast and was a good $. Everything was great for about 3 months and then BLAM! After 3 failures (approx. once per month) and much screaming i exchanged the unit. Turns out that the new one was doing the same thing (2 failures in 2 months). I decided that Maxtor would be out of business if the quality was really this bad, so i started playing with my system/programs looking for other potential causes. I had been using Diskeeper to partition and defrag the drive, so on a whim I switched to Norton's PartitionMagic and Systemworks (using Speed Disk to defrag) and have never had a problem again. 3 years and counting.
I've been doing some research here at CNET looking for a good, reliable external hard drive for my laptop (probably something 100GB or larger depending on how good of a $/GB price I can get). I have been shocked at how many user reviews of the various hard drives have described complete and frequent drive failures and data loss.
Can anyone make any recommendations for a reliable drive? WHat manufacturers have reputations for quality products and good (decent??) customer service?

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