i.e. this one:
http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/6736252/T ... oduct.html

Anyone knows what make the drive is? My other Toshiba 320 has a Western Digital. Now I hear Toshiba bought Fujitsu, is that gonna make a difference?

Basically I want an external HD, but:

I don't want a drive in a plastic case
I don't want a drive with a fan
I don't want a drive that powers off a few minutes after last access because this will lead to a *lot* of stop/start cycles and I think they damage the bearing smore than continuous operation
I don't want a drive with a power supply like a house brick
I don't want a drive that uses a Seagate mechanism

I don't want a Maxtor Basics cause they contain Seagate and they stop/start.
I don't want a LaCie because they contain Seagate, have plastic cases or have PSU like house bricks..
I don't want a Western Digital MyBook because they MIGHT stop/start all the time


I'd maybe like a drive that will do internal raid, and I mean true only mirrored - not any of that striping shit that means I can't just pull the drive and slap it in a normal computer if there is a problem. I'll buy 2 disks and mirror it in software if it's not possible in hardware USB enclosures. I actually have a lacie bigdisk extreme enclosure that will hold 2 drives - can this be put into mirrored mode?
I think it's currently striped

So can anyone recommend a drive that meets all the above, in 1TB+ capacity?

You certainly do not want a lot!!

Buy yourself a 1 TB samsung. Also look at some external usb enclosures.

Why not buy a G-Drive enclosure such as....

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/g-safe.cfm

and buy 2 different manufacturer HDD's to Mirror (maybe a Samsung and a Hitachi - most reliable IMO).

By buying 2 different HDD's, your meantime betweeen failure should increase (in theory!). Bear in mind the controller or PSU could fail, but there's no perfect solution.

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Data Recovery Ireland

Mirror two E7K1000s from different production runs (in case of materials issue).

The catch is that it's unlikely that you can get the fanless enclosure with mirror ability. Why don't you want a fan? Why do you care about transformer size? Good power regulation circuitry takes space. Do you want reliability or small size? You want a hard drive more reliable than a Seagate, but you want a small power supply, which will likely be less reliable due to lower component count and greater thermal effect. I've seen fanless enclosures that I couldn't hear at all. You could always wire a resistor in line with a fan to decrease its RPM further, too.

Also, MTBF of two dissimilar drives is the average of the single drive with the lowest figure with the single drive with the highest figure. 100000 and 200000 would make for 150000. What you do gain in this case, is to decrease the likelihood of the same failure mode affecting both drives.

"I don't want a drive with a fan"

Twit - you deserve the very worst failure possible.

Funny....we take the external case off and use a external 120v cooling fan....Makes all kinds of lovely noises but keeps the raid drives 30 to 40 degrees cooler....Fanless designs are always in for recovery....Especially Lacie crap...

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

He seems to be saying that with mirroring (RAID 1), you can pull out one drive from the mirrored set, and move it to another (non-RAID) enclosure or PC.

Is that true? I thought that all hardware RAID used special on-disk structures, specific to that RAID controller. So, you CAN'T just pull out one drive from a mirrorred set, and slap it in another (non RAID) enclosure/PC.

True? False?