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

[Andras Simon]

On 7/16/09, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> Does anybody know if the "WD Elements" hard drives in enclosures with
> USB ports work with Fedora pain free?  I've heard tales of some drive
> enclosures that go asleep on you, but can't recall if it were this range
> of models, and there's some of these on sale locally for a reasonable
> price.
>
> I had some unidentifiable brand of hard drive enclosure with a Seagate
> drive in it that died on me some time ago (the drive gets multiplying
> read errors).  And I want to find a decent replacement, without a silly
> price, or a crappy fan that's going to make annoying noises or seize up.
>
> You try to be diligent, doing your backups to an external drive, then
> the backup drive is the thing to go west!  :-\  Thank goodness I have
> the original files to back up the backup...  And, yes, the drive got
> treated with kid gloves, and I don't expect hard drives to be treated
> any other way.
>
> 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'd stay clear of any external drive that smells of having been made
for Windows users (say, those that have a button for starting backup).
Just get a good HD, same as you'd want as an internal drive, and a
simple enclosure.

Andras