I have two shot Western DIGITAL external hard drives. A My Book and another one. I'm very wary at this point about backing up my data since these things keep dying. But I need to backup my data! I am looking for an external hard drive I can be confident in. I know they all die at some point, but it's happening too quickly for my taste. I'm talking a couple of years - not decades. What specs do I need to compare? How do I determine what's a superior unit based on specs? (For obvious reasons I'm not too keen on WD).Just pick a name you know.  And sorry you've had trouble with them, WD is a top notch brand. When working with external drives you need to keep two things in mind:

1) Treat them gently.

2) Only connect them when needed. When not in use, store them where they won't be jostled and the temperatures won't get too hot or too cold.

I have pretty much every major brand of external drive, big and small, and have never had any issues whatsoever (and some are probably 10 to 15 years old)Allan is right.
The PROBLEMS with some drives are now history, The products being sold now are very good. Some stores have reports from users that can help identify problems. Expect a good backup drive to last 5ive years if you only use it as needed.
Thanks guys.My brother has been using an old WD 1 TB hard drive that requires an external power source to work for over 4 years now.
It's full of crap and he plugs it in 50% of the time. It still seams to be working, i don't know what magic he uses though.  You don't need magic for a drive to work as it's supposed to.I always buy a drive after first checking user REVIEWS on the web first. I dont buy the next new model. Some models are more prone to failure. I prefered seagate for the longest time, however when i was buying my 3TB I found out that the drives that use to be made at a better quality manufacturing site were now being manufactured at a questionable quality site in china vs I think it was Singapore before. The 3TB still works, but is not used often. Its only used when performing a backup or looking for a file from ages ago and then its powered off again. The model I had bought had some complaints of if used constantly the drives could overheat. A problem that many externals have is that they are not well at vending HEAT and so the drive bakes in the plastic shell... For some other drives that use to run warm in their cases I moved them to a Rosewill aluminum case that has a fan built into it and the drives stay cooler and so my 1TB and 1.5TB that are a mirror copy of the 3TB's data as a last means of recovery if the 3TB died because I have had all my data eggs in 1 basket before and had a complete loss of data. So with externals I have multiple backups for important data. I also bought a SSD drive and added that to an external enclosure and so that is a rugged external data storage that wont have same problems as a HDD that if bumped could crash the drive. I almost lost my 3TB drive when i went to move my fan the one day and its cord was wrapped with the USB cable. The drive already on the floor fell to the side from its upright position and hit the metal leg of the desk on the floor. And I cringed... fortunately it was not spinning at the time and so it didnt damage the platters. But I had a  moment when I saw that happen!   My preference has always been to use Enclosures for external drives. This allows me more flexibility as I can then purchase an internal drive with the appropriate specifications. Most External hard disks are designed for storage and finding 5400RPM drives inside is not uncommon. Another advantage is that I can easily swap Internal drives around and access them from another PC if necessary.