Goonersworld

it depends really on how lucky and how good care you take of it but it should last for atleast 5 years.
my mate still has the same 500Gb he got way back in 06 still works perfectly

I bought my Western Digital (WD5000) somewhere back in 2007 and it still works like a charm.
As Herrpoja said, it all depends on the brand, on how you treat it and of course you need a bit of luck as well.

Personally I never spend more than £80-90 on an external hard drive, first of all you never know what might happen and secondly if you have multiple (smaller) external hard drives you will never lose all your data at once - plus you can back up data of high value on several hard drives to decrease the possibility of losing it all.

Ok, thanks guys