I've also moved to the external 1GB drive and back up my photo's regularly. Hopefully this will be enough, but I know I've lost photo's in the past with bad disk sectors etc.

If I understand what I've read correctly, the best way to extend the life of burnt CD's & DVD's is to store them in a place that excludes as much light as possible.

I find it interesting that the article Greg mentions states that the weak link in hard drives is the quality of the bearing. Then recommended buying a 7200 rpm drive, I thought that a kind of odd piece of advice given that a cheap bearing will fail sooner in the 7200 RPM environment vs. the 5400 RPM environment - assuming that the bearing would have an increased work load in the faster drive.

Just my thoughts.