I'm just curious if anyone here has a good recommendation for a external storage unit for my PC? I've owned both a seagate 750 gig "Free Agent" unit, and a verbatim 160 gig unit.

The Seagate was actually pretty good, until it took a 9 inch drop off my computer desk onto soft carpet and just died.

The Verbatim was cool, till the damn thing started making a really odd "keening" noise (best way I can describe it) and suddenly stopped working for seemingly no reason.

Now, I was thinking something along this line:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=466

but I've heard some rather mixed reports about western digital. So anyone have any experience with this company, or if not any recommendation on a good external drive?

 

Pretty much all hype and bad mouthing you hear about any particular brand should be ignored. It's too hard to prove one way or the other, and the rare problems that are unveiled are usually limited to a particular model rather than the whole brand.

My personal favourite brand for hard drives is Samsung, but there's no more logic behind that choice than there is for rubbing Buddha's belly for luck. I use WD and various Seagate models for my external drives, as well as some Samsung drives in an external, Yum-Cha eSATA/USB RAID box.

Choose based on memory size, physical dimensions, noise, physical stability, stylishness, ease of transportation, speed, features, and most of all price.

The RAID 1 setup you linked to looks quite good and there's nothing wrong with WD. Is USB2 fast enough for transferring your data? I prefer eSATA if you've got the ports for it.

 

Thanks for the info, I generally ignore the hype around most tech (mostly because of the fanbois around each brand), but wanted to make sure WD didn't have some reputation of failing frequently .

As for USb2, yeah it's fast enough for me .