500GB Choices

[LSPIII]

So... It's been a while. Haven't posted on these forums in ages. Thought I'd start out by asking some advice.

I have (had) 2 Lacie 250GB External hard drives. I say had, as one of the drives suffered unrecoverable mechanical failure after just 14 months of use. Needless to say, I was a little peaved to lose 250GB of data. Classic response from Lacie of course - we recommend you backup all your data - which would be handy if this wasn't the backup drive! Anyways, rant over.

I now have an external enclosure begging for a new disk, and after deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that it is sensible for me to look at 500GB disks. Yes I will fill it...

Basically, what should I be looking at. I'm increibly tempted by the Western Digital MyBook External drive (as the auto-switch-off is a nice feature), however the one year warranty doesn't exactly inspire me. If I look at internal drives (IDE only for the enclosure), I am fairly limited in choice. The cheapest at OcUK is the Hitachi drive, but I have never used them before. Are they any good?

To put this in perspective: the drive that died was a Seagate. This is now the third Seagate drive I have had fail on me (OK, over a number of years, but all failures have been Seagate drives), therefore I am disinclined to look at their options. People seem to be having issues with Maxtor drives (although the 4 I am running have been goin in Raid 0 for 3 years without even wincing).

Thanks for your time people.

 

[LSPIII]

And on another note...

I currently have one Western Digital 74GB Raptor (8MB cache version)... I am tempted to get another to raid them up. Is it worth it? Do bear in mind that the extra space will come in handy (I plan on having a major hard drive re-shuffle).

Cheers.

 

[LSPIII]

This may be stating the obvious but a backup drive stores a copy of the data that you have elsewhere i.e. you have two copies of the same data. When one goes, you have the other to fall back on.

Backup does not mean moving your data from one place to another.

True, however it was actually a backup of data on a different drive which I borked myself. I was trying to get the backup back on to the original drive when it went **** up. I guess you could say it was my fault for borking the first drive, but when you have the safety net of a backup you tend to be a little more lax with things. Never mind!

 

[LSPIII]

Well seeing as so many people have been raving about Seagates, I'll give them one more chance. It's a shame that OcUK don't do the 500GB IDE 7200.10 drive though. I had to source it from elsewhere. Hopefully this one won't die on me though. Cheers guys