Re: good external hard drives (e.g. WD Elements)?

Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak wrote:
  

On 07/16/2009 09:58 AM, Tim wrote:
    

Now I'm wondering what can be trusted as a medium for removable backups.
I much prefer the notion of something like a drive that carries
uncompressed copies of files, for direct access to a backup.  Rather
than serial access tapes, or terribly slow multi-DVD collections.
      

I found USB drives to be hugely unreliable. I ended up removing the 
disks from their enclosures and using them inside the main computer 
chassis, like a normal drive.

I think something is buggy with the USB drive implementation, though I 
don't know what exactly (kernel driver, enclosure electronics, who
knows...)


    

I have been using a Seagate FreeAgent Go external usb drive for this purpose
for some time and has worked flawlessly.  When I got the drive I simply
re-partitioned it with ext3 from scratch, and removed all trace of the
Windows one-touch backup system in the process. 

Plugging in to F10 and F11 based systems under Gnome works just fine and I
run backups based on rsync (and rdiff-backup). 

The drive is physically small and neat and the only minor issue is the short
usb lead that comes with the drive.
  

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