Try Hitachi brand. I just upgraded my laptop drive with a 500GB Hitachi. Chose the 7200rpm version. It made my 3-year-old Toshiba laptop run much faster and gave me room to grow for my digital photos. Hitachi makes a line of external drives, too. I have several older SimpleTech brand external drives that hsve been rock solid peformers. When I went to buy another, it turns out that Hitachi took over that brand. Read the reviews, as I did, and it seems that Hitachi gets pretty good marks.
I am running a home made systen with Seagate 500 gig internal SATA hard drive, 4 gig memory DDR2, Windows Home Premiun 64 bit. I want to get an external hard drive to back up pictures, music and do a computer image back up. What size would you recommend? I was just thinking about a 500 gig drive since I do not have alot of pictures at this time
Would I need any back up software to use with it?
Was thinking about seagate but see they have problems via the discussion threads. Thanks for all of you suggestions.

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