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

[Roberto Ragusa]

Tim wrote:
> Does anybody know if the "WD Elements" hard drives in enclosures with
> USB ports work with Fedora pain free?

My WD Elements 1TB works perfectly here on F10.
I don't know how it was partitioned or formatted, I've just rewritten
every byte on the disk (I have a big encrypted filesystem on the
unpartitioned device).

It has an external power supply (the 3.5" SATA disk needs probably
too much power for a USB port), but if you disconnect the USB cable
the drive just spins down. I found this feature really smart:
no wasted power if you have the power supply always connected.

> 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.

Agreed.
My drive is exactly a backup. Multiple copies of the data from many
machines (backup scripts based on rsync and hardlinks).

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it