Recommend me the best external hard drive

It looks like WD My Passport 1.5TB Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive gets fairly decent reviews.

The last external WD drive I saw actually had the temerity to demand online registration and continued connection with the WD server to even use. I would stay far, FAR away from any external drives that company makes. Talk about clueless and stupid.

I have six external WD drives and I never remember any doing that.

The ones that hook up to a network directly (mini NAS) are called WDLive I think.

Yeah got two external WD drives sitting here, never saw that.

I have three WD drives sitting on my desk right now and they don't do that either.

I get enclosures and stick internal drives in them. For my work laptop, I have a NexStar 3 enclosure with a 160GB SATA laptop drive in it. No external power supply needed, supports eSATA.

I just ordered the BUFFALO LinkStation Live 2 TB Network Attached Storage (NAS) - LS-X2.0TL. Will let you know how it performs over Fast Ethernet to a PS3 and on 802.11n.

edit: have received the drive and connected it to our network via Fast Ethernet (100Mbps) on a Linksys WRT160N router. I am able to copy to it over an ideal Wi-Fi connection at 10MB/sec, about 80Mbps, so speed is good. It supports Gigabit Ethernet too, so you should see faster speeds if you have a Gigabit-enabled router. No problem at all connecting to it as a network drive--opens up just like a local drive does in XP and 7.

It also works fine as a DLNA server to our PS3, but unfortunately doesn't support MKV files so I am trying to convert them with mkv2vob to mpg to see if they will work that way. iTunes Server is supported as well, as are Bit Torrent and Time Machine.

Buffalo offers a Web access interface as well with HTTPS support. It's a bit clunky and UPnP support (at least on my router running dd-wrt) cuts out at times. Disabling and enabling the web access support seems to fix it though. Not great, but usable enough for uploading/downloading files from anywhere. One nice thing is that it has web access support from Android and iOS devices.

Time will tell on the reliability front.