I have the 1TB Western Digital My Book Essential which has the USB3 connection (compatible with USB2). I use EaseUS Todo free backup program. First I make a complete image of my internal HDD, and then I can schedule backups on whatever schedule I wish. I love this program for its ease of use after struggling with Acronis. I am very pleased also with the WD external drive. They do stand behind their warranties and replaced an internal HDD that failed, without question. All hard drives are subject to failure, so I think you're okay as long as you stick with a name brand.

It really does not matter that you only need a small drive, they are gone. Replaced by larger volume drives, planned obsolescence. You could remove the existing drive from your enclosure and replace it with a new drive but the savings seem minimal. Then you have the aggravation of doing the task. You would need to determine if the current drive is 2.5 or 3.5 inches and whether it is SATA or PATA (IDE 40 or 80 ribbon data cable) As the drive appears to have failed there is no loss to your attempting to remove the drive if you feel so inclined. Tigerdirect has hard drives from $70 but they also have complete external drives for $90 so you would be saving $20 for a DIY job.

I have two external hard drives, both Western Digital. One has its own power source; the other is powered by USB. Both are 1 TB and I have never had a problem. Pooh Bear ==================== This was sent to me thru one of my Yahoo groups: As I have been going through my archived data discs I have been coming across several of them that have become bad over the years and thus I cannot get anything off of them. There are photos and videos that were on some of them that I cannot replace:-( So, I made an account at an online file storage site to save my precious files to the cloud to help save from disc deterioration. As I was looking around to see what my options were for storing my sensitive data I came across this site and found it interesting. The discs are pricey (about ~$3 a disc) but they are known as the '1000 year disc.' It takes a special burner to burn them. The DVD Burner is like $40 at Best Buy so you can probably find it even cheaper somewhere else if you shop around. Not sure if there are any retail sellers for the M-Discs though. I didn't dig too deep trying to find anything. Check out the site because it is interesting. They say it is like burning the data into a rock, lol! Anyway, I found this a while back and thought I would share it with you real quick while I had the time:-) M-DISC, Write Once and Read Forever. You might feel like you're making a "permanent" backup of your files when you copy them onto a DVD or backup to a computer hard-drive, but the truth is these devices suffer from natural decay and degradation. Current DVD technology uses organic dyes and low laser power to make marks on the data layer of a standard recordable DVD. Over time, these marks become unreadable because organic dyes degrade when exposed to minimal levels of light, heat, and humidity. This means all the data you thought was safely stored could be lost because the discs you used have an average lifespan of only about 3 to 5 years! Why would you risk your data based on an average; hundreds of discs taken into account in that average were corrupt and unreadable after only a few months. With Millenniata, we don't subject you to the possibility of losing your data. When we say "Write Once and Read Forever", we mean it. Here is a link that might be useful: http://millenniata.com/m-disc/

I have many times had to Replace Hard Drives that Crashed (at least 5). Use to take care of a couple Small Businesses computers. If it hadn't been for the Cloned Drives I would have spent countless hours reinstalling everything and restoring files. I too have lots of systems to oversee. No, many aren't mine and I can only recommend Backing up, cloning, etc... That doesn't mean that one will be done! We have 5 Laptops, 1 Desktop, and 1 Tablet all on Windows 10 here at my house. I only Clone 3 of those computers! My old boss lost her home computers hard drives twice, loosing everything before she learned to listen to me! I did get her started on a Cloning Program and it did save her the next time her computer crashed. Not sure what this woman did to her computers, but she had many problems. I do recall her saying they had power outages in their area all of the time, but she did have her pc on a UPS Battery Backup system. She had a ton of valuable information on her home computers, as did her small businesses computers which I maintained for her. Never had any problems with the Work Computers, maybe because she didn't use them (The Office Manager and Employees used them)! Yes, even a dormant hard drive can die, although I've never had that happen. The Business Computers I Cloned usually had Two Clones made. Usually One copy was in the Safe at the Workplace and the other usually stored in a Safety Deposit Box at a Bank!