Yep I bought 3 new harddrives the last few weeks for backups. Each were 500gb, two western digital and one seagate drive (actually thats the first non western digital drive I've ever bought - aside from whatever brand an oem computer might have in it of course).

I had an ancient external drive for my old xp emachine but I haven't felt comfortable using it for backup purposes. I don't think it has any signs of imminent failure but I didn't want to rely on it as my backup drive. So I bought some drives.

I bought one each for my two desktops. Then I bought a third just for media. I had other drives I could have used but they too were aging drives that I didn't feel comfortable using as a primary backup source. So now I'm all set.

I will have to force myself into a somewhat regular backup schedule to make them worthwhile. However at least having SOME starting point will be better than being in an abyss with no way back except for a miscellaneous stack of dvdrs that might or might not have suffered the mythical dvd rot.

I'm using my two older powered drives for my media collection from youtube and other sources. Those will be in combination with my newly acquired pogoplug pro nas adapter. That can actually work with my tablet which is quite impressive (so long as the video itself can play natively on tablet). It can also work with my ps3 and xbox 360. So I am working on moving my wdtv gen 1 to my other tv.

I'm actually getting ready to ripping and converting a lot of my blurays to mkv for my wdtv. I do have another bluray player besides my ps3 but it is my pc bdrom and that is in the same room as my ps3. I'm tempted to get another bluray player. I've seen half way decent ones on ebay for just 25.00 plus shipping. I might seriously do that - or possibly wait for this years black friday bonanza.

So far I'm glad I did this. All three are each sub 100.00 so I'm not out a small fortune on these. And the piece of mind is worth it.

My big goal is to combine my music and photo collections on to this one new drive (the seagate) so that I have direct access to it. I also plan to put a lot of my other media on this. I do have lots of media files backed up on dvdr but this is my assurance I should have access for a long time to come without as much risk of failure of a non readable dvd.

So off I go continuing my backup quest. Also part of this was to free up space on my second internal drive on my dual core pc that I use for downloading lots of video off the net. Its been filling up and I haven't wanted to rely just on my burnt backups (I admit I"ve bought just the off the shelf sony and memorex or whatever brand was on sale - but not the super no name stuff). So I've felt the need to have another insurance policy for my files.

Edit - one annoying thing about the new seagate drive is (I'm using this on vista so it might be different on other os's) that the gb free readout is not visible. It only shows the graphical level gauge of how full the drive is. So far as I know the two wds don't do that - but than I can I will have to look again to be sure. I would prefer to have the number displayed rather than having to mouse over it.