1 TB external hard drives didn't become popular until fairly recently as prices have finally started to drop over the last few months. You probably won't find many people who have used 1TB drives for that length of time, but tons of people who have used smaller versions, which are assumed to provide similar failure patterns as the 1TB drievs. One user writes: <i>I have used several for 3-4 years. Lacie big disk. very high quality, multiple interface types (USB, IEEE1394).Costs have slowly dropped to where they are affordable mainstream. I also am using newer WD drive using ESATA. The speed is awesome (3Gb/sec) and will probably go to this interface for external drives in the future until something faster comes down the pipe.</i> Are you looking for any kind of RAID protection? The problem with these larger drives is you're putting a significant amout of data at risk. Mirroring between two 1TB drives isn't really practicle (waste of space) and running software RAID across them is equally impractical (terrible performance and hard to manage). Have you considered a DROBO? I have had one for about 9 months now and I love it. Provides dynamic RAID and holds 4 drives. Connects via USB. Performance is good. Operated exactly as their flash demo says it does. =========== It is good to use an external hard disk drive with a storage capacity of 1 Terabyte, however, in my own opinion, you really don't need to use that high capacity external hard disk drive if you believe that you cannot use the entire storage capacity.

1 TB external hard drives didn't become popular until fairly recently as prices have finally started to drop over the last few months. You probably won't find many people who have used 1TB drives for that length of time, but tons of people who have used smaller versions, which are assumed to provide similar failure patterns as the 1TB drievs. One user writes: <i>I have used several for 3-4 years. Lacie big disk. very high quality, multiple interface types (USB, IEEE1394).Costs have slowly dropped to where they are affordable mainstream. I also am using newer WD drive using ESATA. The speed is awesome (3Gb/sec) and will probably go to this interface for external drives in the future until something faster comes down the pipe.</i> Are you looking for any kind of RAID protection? The problem with these larger drives is you're putting a significant amout of data at risk. Mirroring between two 1TB drives isn't really practicle (waste of space) and running software RAID across them is equally impractical (terrible performance and hard to manage). Have you considered a DROBO? I have had one for about 9 months now and I love it. Provides dynamic RAID and holds 4 drives. Connects via USB. Performance is good. Operated exactly as their flash demo says it does. =========== It is good to use an external hard disk drive with a storage capacity of 1 Terabyte, however, in my own opinion, you really don't need to use that high capacity external hard disk drive if you believe that you cannot use the entire storage capacity.