Best external hard drive for disaster recovery?

I am looking to backup my hard drive (40G) onto an external one. I need to clone EVERYTHING for disaster recovery. When finished, the external hard drive should be an exact duplicate of the desktop hard drive. Two questions:

1. What is the best and most reliable external hard drive I can get for under $100?

2. What is the best way via software or any other way to clone the desktop hard drive to the external one?

Suggestions & recommendations are greatly appreciated!

1) There's nothing to choose between them really. Personally I buy a drive and an enclosure and build my own.

2) Acronis True Image:

Acronis True Image Home

Cloning is old skool. IMAGING is what you want to do. You have several images versus a single clone.

40G is tiny nowadays. There isn't one best brand of drives. They are mechanical devices. It's not if they will fail, it's when.