Looking for opinions on external hard drives.

 Have lots of pictures that are slowly consuming my hard drive on this computer. I've been thinking about an external hard drive so that I can store all my pictures on it for rapid retrieval instead of sorting through a pile of CD or DVD media discs when I want a particular picture.

How reliable are these for long term storage ? I would likely also burn copies of the pictures to CD/DVD when transferring for double redundancy.

I've heard of some problems with short life on the Maxxtor brands. Does anyone have any experience with the Western Digital brand? Also what is the difference between the premium edition and essential editions ? It looks to me that the premium has the firewire connection and the essential is USB only ?

Would I be better to buy 2 smaller ones for double the redundancy or a larger one that is bigger than my internal computer hard drive of 120GB so I can back up my entire hard drive along with pictures ?   I also see these come with Google Search.  Are you required to use that (snoop /spyware ?) or can you just configure these drives to drag and drop folders and files like another letter drive ?

Any opinions on different brands and durability would be greatly appreciated.

 Here is link to some of the western digitals on Dell site.

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&category_id=5702&~ck=bt

I'm wondering if these are reasonably priced or does anyone have a more cost effective source. I have a 10% off discount code I can use for those on the Dell site.

Thanks in advance for any info.