I've got so much PZR content I'm looking for a new external drive. It's been a while since I bought one - and haveing been burned several times by failing external drives, I thought I might seek opinions here as to your experience with external HD performance and reliability in the 500 gb range.

Thanks for all input!!!

I have an external segate, working off a fire wire, 400Gig for about a year now, and I just got an external Western Digital 500Gig, hooked up to a USB2.

All my original content is on those drives.  I keep runtimes on my local drive. Usually a d: partition.

Don't buy Fantom drives. The one I bought crapped out before the warantee expired and the replacement drive they sent died within a week of arrival.

I use a 500 Gig Toshiba for backing up, had it a while now, seems to be ok!!
I use it mostly for backing up my runtime though, my pz3's usually go onto DVD's or the recycle bin!!
:-^)

I've had great performance and reliability from my Maxtor, and it has a very small footprint. My workstation hutch is becomimg so crowded I have to fight for every inch of space. I don't even want to think about all the wires and cables. One of these days I'm going to have to untangle that snake pit.
One of these days.

Jeff
I would suggest you get an external SATA drive which is what I use.  It's faster than both USB2 and Firewire.  It's basically the speed of an internal SATA drive but it's on the outside.  I have three, 500 Gig external SATA drives which is where I run all my runtimes from.  Good luck.
Adrian

Two Maxtors, one failed just out of warrenty.  Two Western Digitals, one runs constantly with both the app and runtimes, the other a duplicate as safe backup.

I use a Western Digital My Book and an older Western Digital drive for Poser 7 and my Pz3's respectively.  Have only been doing it for a few months, but so far I'm happy and they've been problem free.