Few electrical reasons to use Seagate GoFlex over WD.

1. SATA Connector is exposed from the drive so in case you need to
transfer bulk data to the drive without CPU IO-WAIT, connect it
directly to the motherboard SATA port. USB produces huge IO-WAIT. WD
has a soldered USB connector on the logic board; bad idea in terms of
data recovery / direct IO.
2. Choice of various interfaces - USB2.0, USB3.0, ESATA, Firewire.
Just buy an additional cable for your type of interface. My laptop has
a powered E-SATA port and the drive works at high speed.
3. The cable you buy works with any laptop drive

non-electrical reasons common to all external drives:
1. USB is slow and causes IO-WAIT
2. SMART data is not always available on all USB external drives.
External devices do not trigger BIOS based SMART monitoring. User has
to keep track of SMART. I have seen laptop drives are more resilient
than the desktop ones in terms of sector re-allocation.
3. Backup software bundled with the drive is not a gauge of drive
reliability or ability to recover data in case of corruption.

OP's requirements are totally software oriented, windows 7 has a
decent backup program that can be automated also.


Chetan Bhargava
http://microz.blogspot.com
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