Shopping for external harddrive

[Charlie Kester]

On Tue 05 May 2009 at 07:44:06 PDT Manolis Kiagias wrote:
>I recently replaced my Lacie external hardrive (used for backup) with a
>WD MyBook.  The Lacie was about two years old and the USB interface
>failed. The disk is still ok.  I believe this came along as a result of
>faulty design decisions:
>
>- The disk was on and spinning all the time, no matter if accessed or
>not (it was only getting mounted for an hour or two a day)
>- There was not enough space in the box and around the disk, very bad
>cooling.

I had the same problem with a 500GB LaCie external drive.  The USB
interface had been flaky for a while, and finally died one day when we
had a windstorm and the power went out.  I removed the drive from the
housing and connected it directly via SATA, and it's been running like a
champ ever since.