[X4U] External HD Reliability?

[n]

I personally have no "great hard drive" stories...

Had a Lacie which puked after about a year or two...started acting 
wierd and made ill-sounding noises which no Utility or reformatting 
cured.

Just went thru a bunch of Western Digital "My Books."  Two of them 
started acting up within a week of purchase, and a 3rd was dead out of 
the box...wouldn't even power up.  I have 2 other My Books; one serves 
as a boot volume for a mac mini and seems OK; the 4th is for storage, 
and I'm not 100% sure it's ok...less than 1 month old. Thank goodness 
they're from Costco, so I don't have to get saddled with some expensive 
doorstops.

I have 2 Seagate Free Plays or whatever they're called. Seem ok as 
drives, but they *insist* on going to sleep as I'm working (but if I've 
done nothing for 5, 10 minutes), but that seems to be a "benefit" which 
the HD industry wants us to have far more than just a simple, basic, 
fast, reliable drive that is just a drive and doesn't think or squirt 
out eye candy.

This is kind of a rant, but, I don't need "smart" hard drives to decide 
when I want them to sleep, I don't need Drives which can do backing up, 
and I don't need a hard drive to have an armada of lights like you'd 
see in the helm of the Starship Enterprise.

Hey, HD  Industry:  how about you nix the fancy lights and "smartness" 
and just deliver reliability and performance??

good gravy!



n



On Feb 27, 2008, at 10:48 AM, Zane H. Healy wrote:

> I'm curious if anyone has any comments about the reliability of 
> external HD's, especially the Lacie, and Western Digital models.  I 
> really need a couple external drives for photo vaults, and am trying 
> to decide if I should buy something, or build something.
>
> Zane
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