Help With Choosing An External Hard Drive

[N9ne]

I need an external hard drive that is well cooled (or runs at a decent temperature), that has capacity 300GB, and is USB2.0 or FireWire compatible (or both). It needs to be reliable and fast.

Its usage: I rip all my CDs to fairly high quality MP3s. (I like having my music easily accessible/searchable). I store them on an internal hard drive, but don't want to lose them due to hard drive failure. I have well over 100GB now, and re-ripping takes far too long (I rip in secure mode for ultimate quality, so it takes a long time to rip a CD).

I basically want an external hard drive to backup these files. I don't need/want a RAID solution or anything like that. Everytime I rip an album, I will copy it to the ext. hard drive too. I just want to have two instances of my music. Perhaps I will use a program that will create an image of the hard drive and copy it every night.

So basically, 300GB+, quality, reliability, USB+Firewire, low temperature.

I'm not sure what is required to make it run cool.

There aren't any real budget constraints, I'm looking for something to meet all or most of my criteria, so suggest anything that is available at OCuK.

Thanks in advance!

 

[N9ne]

Thanks for your reply, Michael.

So basically, I just connect that Stardom enclosure to an USB 2.0 Port and enjoy fast speeds?

Can I put SATAII hard drives in it, or does it only support SATAI?

How well does it cool the HDD inside? I'm thinking of sticking a 400GB SATA drive in there and will transfer ~100-300GB across to it once a day. I'm worried how much it'll heat up during this massive transfer. I really need something that has a great cooling solution.

 

[N9ne]

Pics would be great.

The tech specs don't really say whether it supports SATAII. Everywhere it just says SATA. What advantages does SATAII have over SATA?

So it's as simple as plugging it into a USB port? Does it get all its power from the PSU too?

 

[N9ne]

Just bumping this one up. Need a quick answer - gonna purchase soon.