My home PC has accumulated lots of personal stuff (no, not that kind), digital images, music etc, which would be a pain and expensive to have to replace. So I asked some expert techies at work for some advice on a good external drive to get. They came up with 2. Western Digital My Book and Maxtor One Touch.

I, on the other hand, had seen a Teac drive, which judging by their stereo stuff I thought would be high quality. It was also cheaper and looked better, which swayed me a bit. I bought one and needless to say, it was the wrong thing to do. From day 1 it wasn't being recognised by my PC at home and several other PCs at work, which I tried it on. So I sent it back and got a refund (except they still haven't refunded my postage, you nasty www.pixmania.com people).

I then went on to buy a Western Digital Premium My Book 320GB, which have some good reviews out there in the interweb. I had problems with this as well and found some negative reviews which explained some problems people have with these. The My Book doesn't have a fan, so sometime can overheat, which is basically what happened to me. My first objective was to get a complete backup of my PC. The My Book runs and back everything up until it gets a little hot and then the backup software comes up with write errors. I tried several times but each time it overheats after about 45 minutes or so, 25% though the backup. So I sent that one back and got a refund (including my postage, you nice people at www.amazon.co.uk).

So I bought a Maxtor One Touch III External 300GB (with an extra 20GB free - wohoo!). The rest is history. I'm not a technogeek, but this baby really is the business. It has a fan so it doesn't overheat! Yes, yes, I reformatted to NTFS, which is dead easy and recommended for all drives
It just works, and works well. Okay, I might be slightly influenced by the other 2 drives failing miserably, but the Maxtor is a top piece of kit and it's easy to use.
I plugged it in, re-formatted it, loaded the software that comes with it and, away it went. I have everything backed up!

What more could you want.