External Hard Drives

All brands have good and bad models. Even batches. Pick anything really.

I'd recommend getting a USB 3.0 external hard drive probably cost you 5-10 bucks more but if your computer supports it the speed increase is well worth it. Even if your computer doesn't support it but your planning on upgrading eventually I'd recommend it.
I've only really had Western Digital MyBooks and passports and they are working really well.. Hard drives will fail after periods of time that's just the nature of the beast.

You might try getting something like this
and insert any 2.5' HDD inside. USB2.0 is terrible for streaming game data. Loading times will get you crazy..

Most external hard drives have drives manufactured by Seagate which is not a very good manufacturer. At least their older drives broke/failed quite often. So I suggest trying to look for one that has Western Digital's or Samsung's drive in it.

If you're just looking for backup drive, you probably don't need the fastest drive around so you can go with a 5400RPM drive. If you plan to play the games directly from the external drive, get a drive with the speed of 7200RPM. You should still look for a drive that has USB 3.0 or better yet eSATA, if your pc has a port for that.

I use Seagate and works great :)

Seagate/Western Digital are the best and usually the cheapest

Another thing you may want to look at is whether or not it uses an external power supply. The one you have in the link requires it to be plugged into the wall at all times, but you should be able to get a 1tb external that uses power through USB. Not sure if that matters to you or not.

Rrr. I have an 1.5 Tb USB 2.0 MyBook Elite 5400 rpm 3.5" for about 4 years now and it works just fine. I use it to backup important stuff & some steam backups. A little bit over £90 back when I took it but it's worth it. I also have an 2.5 Tb USB 2.0 WD Elements Desktop 5400 rpm 3.5" for almost 1 year without problems. As far as I could see on the website I bought 'em MyBook Elite had a 0% return rate and Elements a 2% rate (glad I'm not among them). Also, I still have 2 old USB 2.0 2.5" WD Portable Elements for about 5 years without a single problem.

As @Desidiosus said, if you only want the HDD for backup and not for daily use I recommend you buy a 5400 rpm HDD as this will help keep the temperature low & decrease the chances of a disk failure. Also, USB 3.0 AND/or eSata should to the trick. My HDDs are slow.
If you also have important data to store on that HDD and especially if you want a portable disk I recommend you WD My Passport (not My Passport Essentials) since it has password protection, HDD encryption & backup software. Same goes for MyBook Elite.

Now, I know this is not something that happens every day but, from my experience, I won't recommend you Seagate. I was unlucky enough to get Seagate drives with my new system, 'bout 4 years ago and 8 HDDs died in the first year (I bought 4 & got 'em replaced all once and still died due to firmware issues) :|.

If you are looking for something strictly to store data on and not actively load data from, almost anything will work really. If you have USB3 ports on your computer find an external with that.

I see several mentions of USB 3 here and absolutely agree - if you're going to PLAY the games from the external, you need fast, fast transfer speed.

Is USB 3 faster than fire-wire, or do they make external drives that use fire-wire? I haven't done my homework on them but I would definitely go with whichever is fastest if given a choice.