I am considering buying an external hard drive and using it for backups. A friend has used one for a number of years without a problem. But looking at various places on the web, I see many reports of people having external hard drive failures. Sometimes even loss of all data. But I don't know if those are relatively rare or not. What do you think? Are external hard drive generally reliable? Or am I asking for trouble? The one I'm considering is Seagate Free Agent Pro. It looks good on paper and has a 5-year limited warranty, but even this one has numerous reports of problems per the forum on the Seagate website.

Nothing data related is ever 100% safe. External drives are more liable to problems yes, but they serve there purpose well! Do you really need it to be external? If you really do and the data contained is off great importance i think you can buy external hdd's with Raid1 setups which duplicate data as to safe-quard it :) Merry Xmas 02coled C2D-E6600ES-8x425-@3.4ghz 1:1 Ram : CPU 2gb Elipedia @ 850mhz EVGA 680i BFG8800GTS-OC 320mb @630-2010 680w Thermaltake Purepower 2 x 250gb Sata2 Vista Home Premium32

I suspect one of the problems is because they are easily damaged by dropping, accidentally knocking off desk especially if something catches on the cable. Internal drives are much better protected from accidental damage because they are within a PC case which sits under the desk and never gets moved (most of time)

Well, you don't hear from people like me who use them and have no problems. Two Venus DS3's with 80G WD and 250G SeaGate, and two Venus DS2's with 40G SeaGate, 40 G Hitachi and 20G Iomega hds. No problems. Why would you knock one of these off the desk? (I did and its still tickin) Reminds me of the Timex watch TV ads back in the 50's... John Cameron Swazzee (sp.) pulls tne Timex out of the torture test and says: "Takes a lickin'; and keeps on tickin'"

..but even this one has numerous reports of problems per the forum on the Seagate website. Doesn't that give you clues NOT to buy it? i_Xp/VistaUser

The best way is to buy an internal HDD. And invest some money in a good 3.5 enclosure with internal heatsinks and fans for the drive such as ACRyan. I have an ZX-5 PATA/SATA to USB/eSATA and it works fine. Already had 3 diferent HDD's on it and never had any problems. The only problem is that every 6 months or so I have to open the enclosure to clean it because os the dusty fans. I'm just a shadow of my former self!

As long as you are just using it for backups (very wise), it shouldn't matter very much if it's internal or external. If the drive dies, you still have the original.