I do not know anything about the equipment mentioned other than the link you provided. But when purchasing new hardware, I always try to find the user-feedback on such equipment. Both the positive and negative reviews. The negative reviews can be very helpful for learning about potential issues or problems with support. Positive reviews sometimes give comparisons to similar hardware, etc. to help give any plusses and minuses in comparison.

I'd be curious to know which of your external drive brands failed on you. I've always used Lacie with Firewire 4 or 8. Only the first which was a 160 GB drive was buggy and learnt too late from their support that I had 12 months support and would have been eligible for a replacement. Other than that, I only use such drives for backup and put them away after use. One day I had one not fixed to hold it securely, I accidentally tipped it over whilst it was in use and despite it was only a light knock just enough to tip it over and not a hard surface below, it immediately died. It was a 1 TB drive. I was told many years ago Lacie ship their drives with various actual brands of drives.

Apple Australia online no longer offer firewire-8 Lacie drives, now only offering the Thunderbolt and my mac does not have thunderbolt ports. So I was considering another brand which does, 6 TB for similar price as the Lacie 2TB with Thunderbolt. In practice, FW-8 is a bit over double the speed of USB2 for my Mac. FW is also good for streaming video to/from TV.

Apple have some kind of online system called iCloud for backing up various types of files, particularly multimedia files for streaming wirelessly. I know nothing about it. I think users get a minimal amount of space they can use and for more they need to pay for the larger space.
Apple also has a built in backup system which will duplicate the entire system to any backup drive and you can backup several generations, presumably it only links duplicate files so it does not take up double the space.

Anyway that's all irrelevant to your needs.