On Thu, 2004-05-20 at 12:10, Keith Palmer wrote: > Hi Cal > > There are some really bad user reviews for these units. I'd also be > very wary of Maxtor drives generally.
Hard drive manufacturer choice is one of those things that varies over time. There was a time when you just didn't touch Seagate; ditto IBM. Every manufacturer has had bad patches. I'm currently using a pair of 250GB SATA Maxtor disks and I'm pretty happy with them. My array of five Seagate SATA disks is going very nicely in the server here, too. I had bad luck with Western Digital last year (three drive deaths out of seven drives) but that was apparently just one bad batch. If you really about your data, use RAID to protect against single disk failures, consider better-tested disks like SCSI drives or the Western Digital Raptor series, and back up regularly. I've had disks from every manufacturer die on me (in well cooled, low vibration environments), and there's just no way to know in advance whether you have a good one or a bad one. As for the "OneTouch" external drives - I've never seen the point. It strikes me as a marketing gimick to increase the price tag with a little bundled software and a cute little button. I'd be inclined to choose good backup software separately and picking up a normal FireWire disk enclosure with a disk of the desired size. Craig Ringer
