I was wondering if anybody has any suggestions on a external hard drive...usb...1TB.
This will be for 2 pc's...both xp pro, sp2. This will only be used for data backup.

I will be returning a 2nd new western digital My Book Essential 1TB today. Junk Junk Junk. 2 in two days. Tech support from india was just as useless as the drive!
The 1st would not update the software after a firmware update.
The 2nd would not allow the usb connection to disconnect(1st one worked fine).
I never got to the point to do a actual backup. So I'm done with western digital.

The backup software that comes with it is very important to me also.
WD's software categorized files into "photos" "movies" "documentation" ect...I would rather select folders/files to be backed up. I hope this is understandable?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Nevermind...with all the problems with external hard drives I've seen, I'm giving up on this stupid idea of mine...lol.
I'm buying 2 more 500GB internal hard drives for each machine for backup, and a 3rd drive for the failing one.
At least I know that this will work.

Stay away from Seagate products, their quality and customer service has gone to the dogs.

I've been going around with them about a problem with the 1.5Tb Freeagent drives.

This is right on the heels of having a Barracuda 7200.11 internal HD brick so I'm not on their list of satisfied customers. I ended up fixing the drive myself so I could transfer the disk image to another HD.

I've been hearing good things about using the Hitachi drives in external enclosures, you might want to look at getting the components and assembling an external HD yourself.

Drive issues are always coming up. Things change w/ any manufacturer and individual experience varies greatly. I look at the warranties, that helps, also reviews of course.. I have still had good luck w/ seagate, samsung and fujitsu. I am more wary of wd and hitachi. I find many hitachi drives that don't make it. Going by manufacturer is difficult. Only so many factories and everything is outsourced to india nowadays and I believe that will only get worse. Best to simply get a decent drive w/ good warranty and just put it in a decent enclosure if you need an external unit.

i had problems with hd's before only to find the bootsectors were infected with virusses only clearing the mbr and low level reformating solved the issues.

The funny thing is that I only use Western Digital internal hd's for the past 13 years(build my own systems) and only had 1 fail out of 6. The present one that is getting S.M.A.R.T. warnings is 5 years old...running everyday.
But the external drives...wow...so many problems...mostly heat issues. And the included software looked like it was designed for 2 year olds. Oh well.
But I got both my pc's with 500GB backup hd's and replaced the failing 160GB with a 360GB hd.
Everythings running fine now...using SyncBack Free for my sync/backup jobs...works good...think I'm going to get the SE version...$30...can install in up to 5 pc's...pretty good deal.  I was surprised that I could not find a backup/sync app that was open source like SyncBack!
Thanks again all for the advice...