I was looking at 3TB drives initially but the cost per mb is still quite high. 2.5TB seems to be the best bang for your buck (or pound in my case). Has anyone got any recommendations? Reliability and being quiet and cool are my main criteria. I'm looking at 3.5" only and I'm going to put it in an external USB 3.0 enclosure (not sure which yet).

This drive ticks the specs box but I can't find any reviews or comments about it with regards to noise etc. WD 2.5TB 3.5" SATA-III Caviar Green Hard Drive - 64MB Cache - WD25EZRX - http://www.ebuyer.com/261311-wd-2-5tb-3 ... e-wd25ezrx

Thanks

Short story: no drive is reliable. Don't fret over which drive to buy and backup.

Long story: in principle, more moving parts means less reliability. So you should avoid drives with 5 platters since you can get a 2.5T green drive with 4 and hopefully soon 3 platters. I avoid WD because they don't make it easy (and sometimes they make it impossible) to know what you're buying.
Hitachi and Samsung make it easy but I don't know if they have 2.5T drives. You'd have more choices with 2T drives. But any reliability advantage you're going to get by buying a 2T F4EG for instance (a drive I would personally tend to trust) is going to be quite small.

To me the best bang for the buck are 2tb atm, they sell around $80, and drop consistently to the $70 mark. Hitachi 5k3000 seems to be one of the favorites drives on storage oriented comunities, i have 9 running atm and ill probably will get another 7 by years end hopping the new 4tb drop them into $69 or less. You can also check SPCR review, Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 2TB 5940RPM Hard Drive, got the editor choice award.

Now if 2tb isnt big enough, my suggestion is to go with an enclosure that can hold multiple drives, for example, Mediasonic 3.5-Inch USB 2.0 and eSATA Pro Box 4-Bay Enclosure - HF2-SU2S23 $110, it can hold up to 4x 3.5 hdds, so you can just add hdds as you need increases, the fan on the enclosure is very noisy at high, but at low i find it good enough, and in my case is not on full time, just for backups overnight.

Thanks for your speedy replies guys. I think I will go for 2TB, more choice and they're cheaper than I thought. Do i go for the marginal increase in reliability of a 3 platter drive like the Samsung (but accept reduced speed with SATA II) or do I future proof where speed is concerned and go for the WD 2TB SATA III (WD20EARX)? I have decided for now to go for a cheap Icybox USB 3.0 enclosure. As far I can tell there are currently no enclosures that support SATA III so not much point spending a huge amount on an enclosure that's limited to SATA II if I have a SATA III drive.

This is the enclosure - http://www.scan.co.uk/products/icy-box- ... b-30-black

WD has a record here of building the most quiet drives on the market, so if thats your priority then i would go with WD. Personally i no longer buy any of their hdds because of issues that i had with mulitple raptors and WD blacks, never really tried greens though, and i might soon with the merge of my two sources of HDs (samsung n hitachi), so i might come back to WD, but as of now, i personally would prefer the Hitachi 5k3000 or Samsung F4, this two seem to be the prefer choice of storage oriented builds (not considering the enterprise version, but for cheap home storage).

There is no performance advantage to SATA3 for consumer hard drives.

I decided to go for the Samsung 2TB SpinPoint F4EG and the Icybox IB-351StU3-B enclosure. Thanks for your help guys!