Why I Need An External Hard Drive

As a pastor who is constantly teaching, preaching, training, writing, developing, and producing multimedia presentations for my congregations, I have no choice to but constantly backup my important files that are products of long nights of work, study, and research.

I use to backup files on CD's and DVD's but for purposes stated below, I prefer external hard drives to backup my files. I have several HD's (two 3.5 at 80 Gs and two 2.5 at 40 Gs) at home. And my office table is becoming cluttered so I am thinking of buying a bigger HD and consolidate them all.

HD Advantages
1. Practical incremental backups - since I am using a Macbook, it's time machine software allows me to do incremental backups as I work. I could not imagine myself using read only optical discs that forces you to backup data in huge chunks. You don't want to waste a 700MB CDR for just 50MB of data. Yet, if they fill it up to get the near full capacity, that may take days or even weeks. If the work/data is that crucial, that's too long to be without recent backups

2. Compatibility - Even if manufacturers promise us that CD's or DVD's have a 100 year life expectancy, there may be a small chance of failure. I have experienced burning something on a certain, when you try to restore it later on using the same PC with the same burner and burner software, the data is mysteriously inaccessible.

3. More sheer capacity - One of the main advantages of backing up on external hds is that they have enough capacity that one wouldn't be forced to backup stuff across 8 DVDs, or 50 CDs. This is actually fine for archives, but for stuff that one needs to access often, it may be quite a chore to have to swap discs all the time

4. Not everyone can just clear out internal hd space- Having an extra hd to dump some keepsake files is helpful to give them more time and space to organize stuff and maybe even burn some of it to permanently relive space from both HDs.

5. Drag and drop interface
You can't beat that. Granted burner softwares are that way too, but there's still the actual process of burning the data, which isn't as quick as to an external hd.

6. Space saver and Time saver - Imagine burning 50 Gig of data on dozens of DVD's. That would take hours of your time. This makes any optical media a totally non-viable backup method, since the cost would be more than a new external hard drive every time and I would need a ton of closet space. And imagine the amount of time you need to sift through you DVD stacks just looking for one file. With HD's, google desktop search or Mac OS X's spotlight enables you to find your files in seconds.

Now my dilemma is finding the best value backup HD that is reliable, fast, and durable. I've had terrible experience with my generic HD external casings. I am thinking of buying a Lacie external hd.

Your advice?