[jyl]

I seem to have at least one hard drive failure a year. Not sure if they aren't making HDDs the way they used to, or if we use HDDs a lot harder now.

The Western Digital 500GB external drive I use for Time Machine backups is acting bad. I'm going to replace it.

What is your recommendation for the most reliable external drive of 500GB-1TB capacity?

In general, are their any rules for getting a more reliable hard drive? Better and worse brands? Slow rpm better or high rpm? 2.5" vs 3.5"?