[Leica] Seagate

[leica at rcmckee.com (R. Clayton McKee)]

Quoth the Tina Manley :

> LUG:
> 
> I've just had my second almost-new Seagate 1T external hard drive
> die 
> within a year.  Seagate used to be the most reliable.  I have
> several 
> 350 GB Seagates that are still going strong after 4 years.  I know
> Seagate bought Maxtor or Maxtor bought Seagate so maybe they aren't
> dependable anymore? 

My experience has been that the only external cases worth using are 
the ones with built-in fans.  High-rpm drives generate a lot of heat, 
especially with long read-write runs of the sort that large scans 
create, and the cases that rely on convection or passive cooling just 
don't handle it well.  Usually this means buying internal drives and 
enclosures separately and assembling them, which requires basic "this 
is what a screwdriver is" knowledge but nothing more.

I've never yet had a problem with a seagate drive, and I have at 
least a dozen including four of the notorious 1.5 tb models, none of 
which have given me any kind of hiccups at all.