External HDD Recommendation

[#1]

It looks like my 1TB Buffalo USB HDD has died on me after just over four years. Annoying, as I had hoped for longer.
Do youse have any recommendations as to brand and/or model I could look to as a replacement? I don't really want one bigger than 1TB, because the bigger the drive, the more faff it is when it finally fails (but I had at least 95% of the data on this one backed up to CD-R or DVD-R, so it's more an inconvenience than a catastrophe). And I'm not yet convinced enough of the reliability of SSDs to go down that route.
TIA

[#2]

Can your Buffalo be dissembled and a new disk inserted?

[#3]

There don't seem to be any screw-holes in it, so it's probably one of those cases (see what I did there?) where you force the thing open and break the one bit which holds everything else together.
Besides which, I don't see the point. The data is on the disc rather than anywhere else inside there. Might as well get a new drive altogether.

[#4]

You've nothing to lose by trying - and you might save a few quid.

[#5]

I may be being more than usually dense here, but I can't see how that would be of any use if the disc itself is cream-crackered. That's where the data is, after all.

[#6]

You might just very slightly be interested in how this has played out since: http://www.thejudge.me.uk/Rants/Rants_20150809.htm.

[#7]

Your Seagate is actually a hard disk.
I've got a 2TB version of your Seagate, which has been reliable for 18 months and counting...

[#8]

the problem with the wd drive is it's a green version, great for putting in external storage units but you have to use the wd software to disable the head park on idle feature or they break down extraordinarily fast (very well known issue) which is also often the cause of the hdd activity, every 8 seconds it spins down the disk and parks the reader arm only to get a hi are you there check from the pc which causes it to spin up and unpark, only to go idle and so on, the hi are you there checks are sent out every 11 seconds and the time out response delay is about 5 seconds (cunningly the drive takes about 4.5 to get back up to working speed and send the "yes i'm here what do you want reply" ) all of which will slow down an otherwise normally operating pc to an absolute crawl, not to mention destroy the external drive,
of course as I mentioned you can disable the drive's eco feature which defeats this cycle to some extent and you can similarly disable the usb selective suspend feature in windows power saving and stop it sending out the check messages which similarly stops the pc from effectively seizing up

not much help to you in this case but useful for the future perhaps

[#9]

I've just reformated mine and don't use Windows - so it only spins down when I pull out the USB connector. 
It also comes with an external power supply, so I can use it on USB 2 connections too.

[#10]

Quote from: thejudge

There don't seem to be any screw-holes in it ...

If there are little rubber feet on it, the screws are likely under the rubber feet, so peel them off and have a look.