Windows 7 - Best External Hard Drive

I'm moving out of my folks house (yay) which means have to stop stealing space on my dad's external HD and buy my own (boo), which brings me onto here for the first time in a while.

I'm looking for at least 1TB. 3.5" and dimensions dont matter. eSATA a bonus but not essential.

Any suggestions?

Also any brands got particularly good software (or particularly bad)? Obviously any experiences of using them with Windows 7 would be helpful

well I had Maxtor and it Died within couple months so i suggest don't get MAxtor I've got samsung and t rock's,

well at least it works for me

samsung or western digital

Seems all of my external drives are western digitals...while my internals flip forth back and forth between Western Digital and Segate.

I have a WD MyBook. Only USB 2.0 but it's still pretty quick. My next backup solution will be an internal drive, to allow the Windows image backup to work right, unless I can find a reliable eSATA drive...

I have a 700GB MyBook as well and I wish I had gone for something else, I found that it was pre installed with allot of crapware and it was also formatted in FAT32 which meant I could not save any files on there larger then 4Gigs.

Unfortunately I didn't know it was formatted in FAT32 when I started to back up all my Data from my old external drive and when I did realize I already had 300GB on it, anyway i decided that I wanted to format and start over so I spent about 5 hours taking everything off again, formating and then putting everything back on.

On a plus side if you have your drive formatted in FAT32 you can it use to play movies on your TV if you have a DVD player with a USB port on it like on mine, which is very handy but for me it's not needed as I already have a 8Gig USB drive for that.

Another thing that really annoys me about it is when you don't use it for a couple of minutes it seems to go into some sort of power saving mode and when you go to access it again it usually takes about 10 seconds to respond, aside from that it's not too bad but I'm sure there are better one out there.

Western Digital. I went thru 5 maxtors in 11 months, so Im not buying another

Ken

Out of curiosity, what problems are you having with the Windows image backup? I've backed up to a 320GB external USB 2.0 hard drive and have restored numerous times, even to different hard drives without a single issue.

lol Maxtor suck's i guess I'm not the only one with the problem

How about one of these monsters?