But I would like to ask if any of you have recommendations on another external hard drive?
Sorry to hear about the toubles!
I'm planning on upgrading my backup solution this fall to a Drobo, and am going to store & run it from my office.
Not sure what kind of dollars you are looking at dumping into a solution, but for the price I don't think the Drobo's are very bad at all, considering they'll grow with you and offer the redundancy that Rusty spoke about.