[Leica] Consensus on external hard drives

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

It's always best to avoid the newest biggest meanest hard drives, because 
they're always rushed to market to get good profit margins.

I would stick with 160GB to 250GB for USB2 external hard drives for now, 
because they are physically stronger than the bigger ones and you're going 
to be moving them around.

If you're not going to move it around, but just leave it where it is and 
turn it off when you aren't using it, then in my opinion it's safe to go to 
500GB. I do not yet trust any hard drive bigger than 500GB for reliable 
long-term storage, though the time will come when I do. By then there will 
be 1TB drives on the market, and the cycle continues.

Seagate makes some lovely "pushbutton backup" non-portable external hard 
drives that are available for under US$400. I trust them, but not quite 
enough to have them be my only copy of anything. Backup is not the same as 
archive. If this will be my only copy of something, I would put it on 3 
different 120GB drives and store them in different places.

I'm not worried about the file system issue. The FAT32 format, while 
Microsoft proprietary, is widely known and widely implemented. There is no 
danger of it becoming unreadable anytime soon.

Brian Reid