Hard drive advice?

[BigV]

I'm sorry, glatt. I focused on the unimportant part of your question. My apologies.

Yes, all the first tier manufacturers are approximately equal to five decimal places in terms of performance and reliability for your uses. IBM, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Fujitsu... they make the good stuff (apologies to the other good stuff makers, just listing these off the top of my head). I stand by my two drive strategy, but whichever one you get should be ok.

Capacity is a concern and it is proportional to cost. You should look for features like USB 2.0, perhaps an enclosure that includes a cooling fan (this cuts both ways. a fan lets the drive run cooler, which is all good for the drive, but it introduces another mechanical component which may fail. and any drive that "needs" a fan in the enclosure certainly should have one, not a busted one...but I digress). SATA or PATA drives are the newest technology, contrasted to IDE or EIDE. You might include in your shopping evaluations the option to assemble your own versus a preassembled package.

More laterz.