Which backup hardrive?

[Messiah Khan]

Im after a 500Gb hardrive to act as short terms backup for my 2 X 250Gb WD drives. Rather than RAID, I will be using a script that runs every 24 hours to synchronise the data. This way if I delete somthing accidentally, or get a virus I stand more chance of saving the files. It will mainly be used for backup of Photographs, ie .TIFF, .JPG and .NEF of about 5-50Mb each. The number 1 feature im looking for in this drive is reliability. Im going to be backing the data up to DVD as well, but I want that to remain as a last resort. Its going to be housed in a Smartdrive 2002c enclosure. the ones ive got my eyes on at the moment are;

Seagate Barracuda ES 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache
Western Digital RE2 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache

Are there any others I should consider? And which of these do people recommend? All my other drives are WD so im leaning towards the WD one. Whats the difference etween the standard RE2 drive and the (WD5000YS)version?

 

[Messiah Khan]

Cheers guys, ive gone with a WD 500Gb AAKS in the end. On another note, I know you back your pictures up on DVD/CD as well rpstewart. What way do you go about this? Do you use any sort of automated system, or do you just manually choose which files and folders need backing up? For me it wouldn't be too hard to do manually as the folders are named with the date, but I was wondering if there is a better system.