Are all external hard drives the same?

G-Techs are the quietest and most reliable drives I've owned (5 of them for about 6 years now with no failures, all conventional ones and one solid state).
The newest versions are the quietest. They run cool too with little vibration.
I have a 3tb version.

Reliability is the thing I would worry about the most.

I've run the Seagate 1.5 and 2 Gb USB drives from BEst Buy for a few years now and have found them to be most reliable and essentially trouble free. They also come with backup software installed which has also been very reliable and trouble free. I see no reason to look elsewhere, there is some motor noise when they first fire up, but nothing of much consequence there really.

Highly recommended.

Whoops, I meant Tb, not Gb above.

Sorry.

I use Hitachi Ultrastar 1Tb drives and have had excellent results with them.

I know that many VERY large cloud storage companies (which I won't name but guarantee that you have heard of) use these which speaks volumes to me.

I've got two Lacies: attractive aluminum cases, fanless, pretty quiet, south of 200 bucks for 2TB, maybe well south, depending on model. Purchased from Amazon @ competitive prices.

Whatever you do, I'd rip my material to two drives, and keep one off site (say at work). This is a pretty cheap way to ensure not having to repeat a lot of ripping labor if there's a failure.

Some people use RAID arrays for redundant storage, but for audio, this doesn't buy you much. You will be up and running immediately if you have a drive failure, but this is not very important for a hobby, and having a RAID doesn't protect against "environmental" failures like fire, flood, children, pets, and theft.

John