External Hard drives. Which do you own?

[RTaylor]

Need some suggestions. Currently own 2 Seagate external drives, one is a 500Gig, the other 1.5TB.
Have never had any problems with either of them but with soooo many photos both in RAW/NEF and some processed to larger Tiff format, I'm running out of space on both of them.
So we purchased a Western Digital 3TB from Best Buy in May. This week the drive is no longer recognized by my desktop or my laptop computer. Already been on the phone with WD and they didn't help much at all as far as getting it recognized.

Come to find so many on the internet are having the same problem as I am.
I even checked out Seagates 3TB drive and it seems that too has overheating problems.

With all the data both in photos and other important work I have to have backed up, the 3TB is a must for me and was going to use the 2 other smaller drives for a split out of the data from the 3TB as dup backups.

I wanted to hear what external drives do you use and what has been your experience.
If I am able to get my money back on the WD drive, I need to replace it and would need an affordable solution.

[Kyotie]

I have a 1tb and two 500mb,s and the tb on my computer, I split up my hd's and have duplicates so that if one go's down I have copies on another. I archive with duplicates for the same reason, if one go's down, I copy to a new one, so I reason that more small drives are better than big ones. Besides I don't need to get to all my photos all the time. Some people use cd's, and I hear that they are coming out with gold cd's that will last decades, but technology changes so fast that I feel that I need to be more flexible than that. If it were me I would buy 1tb,s and archive some stuff with duplicates. I don't hold on to everything I take and I tend to get rid of old stuff, as I improve my skills.