Slim Devices SB3 external hard drive

I have recently seen 1TB IOMEGA external drives advertised for as little as $244. This would yield a price of less than $500 for a twin drive system for full backup. Here is the relevant IOMEGA page:
http://www.iomega.com/direct/products/family.jsp?FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=26891277&ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=26890319
I am not sure of long term reliability of IOMEGA drives. I chatted at RMAF with the McIntosh rep. . . McIntosh is using twin Seagate 500Gb Mission Critical drives for their music server offering. This simply points to the fact that manufacturers offer different levels of reliability for different applications. . . and what is found at Best Buy or Fry's may not be the most hardened versions. A call to Seagate, Iomega, Western Digital, Hitachi and Samsung, Toshiba will let you determine what are their most reliable or mission critical offerings. Note: Maxtor is now part of the Seagate group.

For a slightly different opinion than the previous poster's, it's much more common to have a "user failure" (ie, accidental deletion or other form of software corruption of the files) than a hard drive failure. Most hard drives produced today are remarkably reliable; go with inexpensive offerings from well-known manufacturers, and just get an extra one for backups. That's what will really protect your data.

Michael

Michael, perhaps you would like to tell my comatose Maxtor Onetouch 250Gb External that it has suffered only of a software crash and it's time to get off its little spinning a s s?!
Alternatively, you may want to visit Newegg.com and read user reports of various drives. . . reality is that consumer-level drives these day are often not terribly reliable. . . there is a real price war going on these days, and drives are cost engineered to a very low price point.

Thank you all for your input, looks like I will need to do as much research for these as I have for other gear.
Thanks
Jeff

Audioperv, I must be living a charmed life from a hard drive standpoint. Out of the dozens of hard drives I've owned over the years, only one catastrophically failed, and that was after 4-5 years. One other was DOA. I also build/fix machines for friends, and I've only seen one of them die.

The mean time between failure on drives is in the hundreds of thousands of hours. And I guess my experience backs that up.

That's why I advocate 2 inexpensive and large-capacity drives. The 2nd drive will be a backup to the first (and preferably stored elsewhere, for maximum protection). The backup drive is the true defense against data loss, regardless of the mechanism.

Jeff, get an external drive enclosure such as this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817198012

Then get a 500GB SATA drive (Seagate and WD have reliable for me for years). It's a breeze to install. Just remember to get two of them so that one can be used to backup the other.

Michael