A friend has been experiementing with burning DVDs and his conclusion is that Memorex media, as far as the DVD disks are concerned, are readable on all of the machines he has tested them on so far. That hasn't been the case with some of the other brands. You might want to look for some reviews and see if this lines up with other users' opinions.

Robomatic, I think the external hard drive is going to be a critical player in my future backups and security, and it won't live in the same room as the rest of the equipment.

SRS