Windows 7: What type of external hard drive do I need

Still havent made a decision yet. Thanks for everyone's help. Can anyone recomend a good name brand?

That is a tough call. I have external disks of 7 different brands. The only one that ever died was a Seagate. But that was also the oldest. I would go by price. They all come from Thailand and chances are that 5 different brands are being produced in the same building by the same people.

I use Western Digital for my internal and external HDD's. I just bought a WD Elements SE 500GB HDD with USB3. Plug and play and no power adapter is needed (great for cable management and space savings). I think I'll be getting another one.
As far as backup programs, I don't use any. I formatted the external drive when it was first plugged in. If I need to use a backup program, it would be "Backup and Restore" from within Windows 7. I just drag and drop files to the drive that I want backed up. I don't use my computer for any thing "essential" so an automatic backup is pointless.

WD are good drives.

Hey pepsi, never ever be afraid to ask questions, and you did not anywhere here ask a "stupid" question. Best of luck with your external hard-drive situation; in my country on the main auction website there are a lot of people hawking external (USB) hard-drive cases that you are supposed to put a hard-drive into. i got one and it wont work!!! It has not got an LED light to tell you whether or not it is even getting any power, so where it is now is dumped in a corner in a box full of junk!!!

Hi. Here is a beautifully designed backup system to check out from an awesome download website called "Snapfiles" (this website is famous for how clean/ non-buggy their software is):

DriveImage XML (Private Edition) Freeware download and reviews from SnapFiles


Snapfiles has got far more superb free programs than that; here is one that is designed to transfer entire Operating Systems (complete with Drivers and updates, etc) from one Hard-Drive to Another:

XXCLONE Freeware Freeware download and reviews from SnapFiles

Geeks rave about this program because it is not like a "snapshot image" but instead actually writes everything onto the target Drive in exactly the same way an Installation Disk does.

Incidentally, if you scroll down the page on Snapfiles when looking at a program, you will find often many "User Reviews" that are full of valuable information on most occasions. Snapfiles is good!!! (MajorGeeks isn't bad either but pretty untidy and badly needs a facelift!!! MajorGeeks though is a very good place to get the latest/most up-to-date versions of programs that you know and trust. For programs that you don't know, then always use Snapfiles because, as mentioned earlier, all of their stuff is clean and is safe to try out).

http://majorgeeks.com/