shopping for a 4TB external hard drive

I have a 2TB Western Digital drive, which is also available as 4 TB, and I believe also as 4TB Raid. It's stable, looks good (important for women like me...), and the price is very fair. Look around whether you'll get it somewhere near you, they also have explanations on their internet page.

As I remember, most drives larger than 2tb are Raid type. I also have the Western Digital 2tb as a main drive--just switched over from a 1 and .6 tb drives. I think the drive, I got the studio version so that I would have the FW800 option but am also thinking of getting an e-sata card.

You can buy a Hitachi 2TB drive for around $129 now. Just buy a couple and some enclosures.

These drives are awesome!

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/g-raid.cfm

I dont think you can get a 4 tb none raid, 2 for sure, I use Lacie with my Mac, never had a problem, used them on PC as well, but the G-tech looks pretty good also.
Ross

That is a considerable amount of data to store on one drive or on a RAID-0 set of drives. If you do it, you need very good backups.

When you are considering that much data, a RAID-5 NAS (Network Addressable Storage) box would be a good alternative - not an inexpensive alternative, but a good one. You still need backups (RAID-5 is NOT a backup), but a single disk failure will not wipe out your data.

Here is a site to start your research: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-basics/30914-how-to-buy-a-nas-shorter-version

this is a 3rd backup.

Get a second generation Drobo. You can start with as few as two 250GB drives and add capacity as you need it - up to 8Gb currently without losing data or being locked into mat hing drive brand and capacity as you are with RAID 5. If you go with Raid Arrays don't bother with raid level 1 (and never think about Raid 0 if your interest is long term storage.) Drobo is much easier to manage and keep with expanding needs and thesecond gen Drobs are much, much faster than the 1st hen version especially if you have FW800.

Get a second generation Drobo.

We usually agree on most things but... I simply don’t see the cost to benefit ratio of the Drobo. For the cost of a new box (and yes, I see you 2nd gen so I’m not sure where they are today), you can buy a really good Raid WITH drives. Last time I checked, the empty box alone was over $350. Considering its also a proprietary solution, I’ve yet to see what Drobo brings to the party for the cost. Yes, you can swap out individual drives and update the Raid. But you can reconfigure a standard RAID system too and recycle the drives using something inexpensive like the Newer Voyager.