I have a pair of Western Digital Caviar Black 1-TB drives (one for data, one for backup) that at present usage rate are going to be full in another 6--8 weeks.

I plan to replace these drives with a pair of 2-TB units. (The 1-TB drives will be "recycled" as replacements for two 300 GB drives. I don't know what I'll do with the left over 300s.)

I've been looking at this drive, but am not wedded to it. The use to which these drives will be put is primarily data archiving. There will be no operating system or executables on them. One of them (the backup) will be used as an eSATA external drive. They will not be used in any kind of RAID setup. Speed is not important, long service life and reliability is.

Of tangential relevance is that the drives will NOT be purchased from Amazon even if they're cheaper. There are literally hundreds of horror stories of how Amazon ships hard drives, rattling around loose in oversized boxes and the DOA rate from Amazon is truly staggering. From Newegg the horror stories are about drives shipped by Newegg's default carrier, UPS, many reviewers say to spend the extra $10 and have them delivered by FedEx.

Is this a good choice of drive for my purposes?

tanstaafl.