External Hard drive for backups

Just wondering what the consensus is regarding external backup hard drives lately. Anyone have views they care to share. I have three of these things. 2 are Seagate that came with backup software, that never really worked properly, and the the third is just an enclosure with USB 2 connection. Now with the price of hard drives having dropped so much, and disks taking off in size I am rethinking the whole bunch. Was going to take the units apart and upgrade the drives, but then I thought what for. The interfaces were suited to the drive size at the time. Now with Terabyte size drives, interface speed is an issue. Pointless getting a hard drive capable of 6gbytes per second interface and then running it through a bottle necked USB port. Trouble I have is chucking out tech stuff that's still working. Perhaps I will use them as a backup of a backup and just retire them to storage. Anyone have thoughts on these ? I don't want to end up with an ever growing collection, would not mind if it were handplanes them I like but these remind me too much of work.

I have never had a failure with Western Digital "Elements" drives. No weird firmware, no "built-in" software, etc. so they are my go-to for reliability. For size, convenience and methods of use, some others may win. I currently have a small rugged little Toshiba 1T USB drive that, although a bit sluggish, has stood the test of travel.

I go with a dirt simple hard drive dock and bare drives.

You can get e-sata cables to hook them up, if your MOBO supports it.

I can't even count the number of hard drives, external drives, etc. I have laying around.

But I'll never by an external drive again. Just a sata dock, with an esata connection to the mobo.

Thanks guys. Brent thanks for reminding me of that option. Duh i dont know why it did not occur to me. I have a esata port i specifcally wired into my server case for my one seagate that is esata interfaced.
Gonna make a caddy like we have for sandpaper except make it take a tower of hard drives. Then get a decent dock hopefully with two ports. Thats would be a solution with more longevity than adding enclosed drives.
Thanks man.

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I have used Casper for years with a simple hard drive dock and bare drive.
It copies everything including OP Sys.

Had a main drive fail a couple of times over the years. Replaced it with the Casper copied external and it worked fine.

I have a WD 1TB external drive connected to my wireless router and copy data from each of three computers onto it occasionally. I'd like to make the copy process automatic, but haven't found a product I like yet (cheap). Windows Sync will not work - says there is no compatible drive anywhere on my system.