The Worlds First 3TB External Hard Drive, From Seagate. Has USB2 built-in, and you can upgrade to USB3/Firewire for a fee. I would do that upgrade. Otherwise it would take forever to transfer that amount of data.
Acronis Drive Monitor Free Download to Monitor Health of Hard Disk Drives Best Software Online. I’ve used Acronis and it is a fantastic software. It does the job that it claims to do and saved me a ton of time.
This thread is very interesting if you have external storage drives and are having problems. Really you want to get external drives with the Oxford chipset like OWC sells. I wrote a separate post about my positive experiences with them here. If you avoid LaCie, WD, Iomega, Imation, Samsung, Drobo you should be fine. I have read stories about major problems with all of these brands. Seagate, Toshiba, Hitachi seem to have the most reliable hard drives and enclosures at the present time.
These sizes are such affordable prices now. Of course reliability is the most important thing with a drive this size. Unless you are lucky enough to have a RAID system! A guy can dream can’t he?
It seems to be narrowed down to non “green” or energy efficient drives. It happens with Toshiba and Hitachi drives, but not green Western Digital drives. Even when the drives are self powered, it doesn’t seem to be enough. There was extensive troubleshooting done at the Apple discussions on this thread but no solution has been found yet. It seems more common with drives larger than 1 TB.