the specs sticker on top of the box states copyright Apple Computer 2006, and the oldest applications we haven't modified date from Dec 2005/Jan 2006. I bought it second hand in May 2008.

... that suddenly refused to play home made CDs. The solution was to burn discs at a slower rate - x1 or x2. Anything faster than x4 wouldn't work.

Looking at the Macupgrades difficulty assessments for fitting an internal has made me reconsider my blithe "either will do" comment of earlier 8-}

I'm thinking now along the lines of external DVD drive, and would welcome any compatible suggestions from anyone.

(BTW I've just tried the SMC reset, but to no avail...)

... Nigel the bald.

Good engineering and industrial design doesn't come cheap.

but this is clearly the place to ask.

Hope someone can come up with the goods for you.

I've got the D2 Quadra (which means nothing to me). 1TB, solid, not expensive but fine for me - I keep all my photos, duplicates of my record library and back up my hard drive via Time Machine. When I fried my computer's hard drive it was a life saver.
Currently £125.00 at Mac Warehouse. my missus has the LaCie Hard Disc 1tb - same price but looks cool. Ours are firewire but I think you get get usb as well.

I guess I better start by declaring a bias here - I work for Seagate so you can guess which model I'm going to recommend. In all seriousness, the Seagate Freeagent drive is pretty good, comes with a 5yr warranty etc. I would stick with the 1TB or 1.5TB version - the 2TB is more leading edge technology so is a little more expensive and not as mature.

The Lacie drive mentioned above is fine, but remember that Lacie don't actually make the actual drive themselves and inside you will find something from Seagate / WD / Hitachi etc. Lacie are just adding the external interface and design.

As you are using as a backup for a Mac, I would recommend you track down a version with FW800 interface - most you find in the stores are just USB2.0, but both Seagate and WD do versions that are more "Mac Friendly" and have USB and FW interfaces.

Finally, remember that at the end of the day this external drive is still a hard drive and still can fail. If you are using as purely a backup drive (i.e. just a copy of what's on your Mac) then fine. However with the massive amounts of digital media that people have these days, there is a tendency to use external drives as primary storage. However, people still see them as backup drives and do not expect them to fail - whilst they will be more reliable (usage is not as high), they can still fail and if they have all your irreplaceable data on them, you are screwed (warranty or not). Make sure you have a backup of any data - even if its on a external drive. I have just managed to extract critical data from a relatives failed external drive which involved swapping out one of the chips on the electronics board that had failed - not an easy job and something I can only do as I manage the group that does board level Failure Analysis !

Personally, if you budget would stretch to it, I would go with a simple RAID configuration - two 1TB drives replicating each other so if one fails then you do not lose data. Buffalo do some reasonable systems or if you really want to push the boat out - I use a system from Drobo (www.drobo.com) where I can put up to 4 drives (I have 4 x 2TB) in a RAID5 array - this allows both data protection and ability top expand - if full add another drive (if you have less than 4) or swap one drive with another of higher capacity.