How should I choose the right external hard drive to store my books, songs and movies?

There are a lot of external hard-drives out there that you can lay your hands on! It all depends on you and I think you should just get one external hard-drive for everything. Don’t get three external hard drives for each category!
It doesn’t really matter which external you have because they will all work with your mac. However, the external’s compatibility with your mac OS might be non-existent! I had the same question a while ago and I spent some time reading and researching about all this. I had a lot of experiences with external hard drives and trust me they will eventually die.

I have a macbook myself and I would strongly recommend that you get the Iomega mac edition. There are two types, the 1tb and the 2tb edition. I would go for the 2tb edition because the 2tb is like 10 dollars less and TWICE the size! Greatest deal ever.

I got mine from amazon and here’s the link to it Iomegaexternal. It also has 3 years warranty and goes with a mac perfectly. Things to avoid? Just organize your files on a daily basis and have the anti-virus scan it between once in a while to avoid any bugs or viruses that may affect the hard-drive. I’d be twice as careful if I would use my external on someone’s else computer too.

I’m pretty sure there a lot of brands out there too, Western digital is really good but Iomega works like charm for me. Check out the link up there!
Good luck!

In the end, all hard drives will exhibit failure. I have about 1000 movies, Thousands of music files, etc.
If you are serious about file storage chose a product that has RAID striping across multiple drives.
This way you are not subject to single drive failre.
Some links to products:
NetGear
DLink

Review

Get at least 1TB drive. The cost-to-memory-ratio makes those 1TB drives much cheaper.

Instead of getting one expensive hard drive, buy two of the cheapest name brand hard drives. The odds of two cheap ones failing is 69 million times less likely than one expensive one failing.
A good site is Price Watch.
http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_removable_drives/

I have two internal hard drives on my PC and back everything up.

I have a desktop Seagate 1 TB drive that was a hundred bucks. Get something with a quick RPM (usually around 7200. You can format most drives to work with mac or pc if it already is formatted one way or the other. Just youtube “format external drive for mac”

My friend bought Seagates back in ‘03 that still run like a locomotive. For that reason I buy only Seagate, and will continue to do so until it gives me problems. My Macbook came with a Seagate . . . So if Apple trusts them, they might be ok ;)

Thanks for asking this question because I needed to get a new external hard drive myself. I am not very tech savvy so I tend to go with the expert’s recommendations. I have a MacbookAir and after a little research on CNET and similar tech forums I decided to get the G-Drive 500 GB External Hard Drive by Hitachi. My main attraction was it’s slim design and ability to run off the USB port which makes it perfectly portable. I’d say it’s great if you want to carry your music along with you or if you’re on vacation and want to store pictures on it as you go to clear out your camera’s SD card.

I also do a lot of sketching and research at work that I like to take home with me. It will be really easy to use this hard drive in place of 3 or 4 flash drives as I have been doing previously. I’m going to love keeping it all in one place. I don’t want to back up everything on it, just select specific files, organizing them all in separate folders. One great thing is that if you wanted to use this for backup from your Mac, it works seamlessly with Time Machine. You don’t have to specially format it, just plug it in and it will ask you if you want to use it to backup your Mac.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004PJMUNW/ref=oh_o03_s00_i00_details
For movies of course you want to go with something that has maximum storage capacity of 1 TB- 2TB. Seagate is highly rated as mrich724 says.
http://reviews.cnet.com/best-external-storage-drives/