The best External Hard Drive for the money

Hi,I want to buy an External Hard Drive.
1~1.5 TB will be sufficient...
I have this system:

What is the best for that?

Why not just buy an external enclosure and drop whatever drive you want into it? I've had good luck with the vantec nexstar series.

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCat [...] Enclosures

I posted a link to some of them. You can get an enclosure that will fit your drive, either 2.5" or 3.5". The internal connection can be either SATA or PATA/IDE. Since most computers now have USB ports, you can get the enclosure with a USB port.

Basically, you just open the enlcosure, put your hard drive in it, then connect the enclosure to your pc. It's the exact same thing as an external hard drive except opening the case/enclosure won't void your warranty and you can put most any size drive in it.

If you were to buy a 500gig external hard drive and in 6 months realize it's not big enough, you would have to buy a new one or void the warranty by opening it up. If you had bought your own enclosure, all you would have to do is take the old drive out of the enclosure and put a bigger drive in.

I never mentioned anything about speed, however a drive will always run at the same speed regardless of it being internal or external. What makes most external drives "slower" is the fact that the USB bus is slower than the SATA controller. If you got an external enclosure that has E-SATA and your computer supports E-SATA, then the drive will run just as fast as having it mounted internally.

USB is more portable since most computers have USB. E-SATA is faster than USB 2.0

You should be able to enable the esata port on your computer via the bios. They make enclosures that have both USB and ESATA connections though only one of those connections can be used at a time. That means you can get esata speeds on your computer and USB portability if needed.

The enclosure you linked to is fine as long as you trust the vendor.

Also, 2.5" (laptop drives) drives are slower than 3.5" (desktop drives) drives.

There's no real way to tell since you don't know what model of drive they have in them. You'd have to look up benchmarks for them online. That's one more advantage to buying seperate enclosures and drives to make your own external drive.