Good External HD

What are a couple top brands for good reliable external hard drives? 120G, maybe more.
Suggestions?

If I were your DallasDad, I would buy the hard drive of your choice and then a 3rd party external drive case. Much simpler, no proprietary drivers involved and usually they're less expensive too.

Since you only want around 120 GB or so, maybe you might consider using a 2.5" laptop size hard drive. That way you'll have more portability too.

Here's a very good 250 GB Western Digital drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136279

Here's a nice external case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817388031

If you want a 3.5" drive, there are many good deals also at Fry's Electronics. Since you live in Dallas, there's a Fry's. The friday ad insert is always a good deal because most the prices listed are at or below cost. Fry's uses them as "loss leaders" to generate traffic in the store.

I would suggest a SSD. Because and external drive is likely to get bounced around a lot more. And spinning disks don't like to be bounced around.
Example SSD.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820239045

But you would still need to buy the enclosure.

Just remember with SSD's stick with major brands.

Hope this helps

Seagate is a good brand to go with. They can be pricey but their SSD's have served me for the last 5 years and haven't had an issue once. I think newegg has some lying around. I'll have a look later.

Seagate doesn't have a full fledged SSD, they have what is known as a hybrid. Hybrids are a combination of SSD and mechanical platters within one drive. I've been waiting for Seagate to introduce a full fledged SSD but they haven't done it yet.

There is no reason to spend the extra money on an SSD.

What Shintaro seems to forget is that hard drives park their read/write heads when the power is removed. So even if the hard drive is dropped it won't hurt it. Just don't drop the HDD when it's powered up though.

BTW, these hybrid drives are really nice, and fast. Instead of (or in addition to) a standard RAM buffer, typically of 32Mb or less (a few have 64Mb), these hybrid drives use a flash SSD of 8Gb. That's huge! And a good thing.

For the small bump in price, I think these hybrid drives are worth it - if full SSD is beyond the budget.

No, I am perfectly aware of that. I even remember the old utility "Park".

But a external drive that never gets bounced around when it is on. Now, that would be a miracle. Well I suppose it is not impossible just unlikely.

I think you are assuming these external drives are constantly on the move - like (or with) notebooks. That is not necessarily so at all. I know of many, many users who setup an external drive and rarely physically touch it after that. When used as a NAS - network storage device, it may sit still, its entire life - yet used every day, accessed by several computers on the network.

I personally like hard drive docking stations much better than enclosures. I can just pop a drive in and start using it. Wrong drive? No problem. Yank it out and pop a new one in. These are ideal if you do need to swap drives frequently. But for others, an enclosure does offer more protection from physical abuse/accident.

Mate,
I always err on the side of caution. While it is true that some people leave the drive in a safe and happy place, it can never be assumed for everyone.

I expect the worse, but hope for the best.

Yea, I have been looking at those for a while. I think that there are different version that allow for SATA and IDE to plugged in.
I still use a caddy draw for drives that I am working on for a while. But I have a IDE & SATA USB cable for quick change. But that device that you suggested is much nicer.