external disk drives

[Tom Metro]

Laura Conrad wrote:
> Does anyone have advice about which brands or designs are best for
> this purpose?  

Dan's suggestion of buying and assembling an external drive to get the 
longer warranty makes sense, though a 1 or 2 year warranty may be 
adequate for the useful life of this drive. You'll have to decide what 
your likely usage is going to be.

There are some ruggedized external drive enclosures on the market, such as:

$130 LaCie Rugged XL 1TB USB 2.0/eSATA External Hard Drive
http://www.buy.com/prod/lacie-rugged-xl-1tb-usb-2-0-esata-external-hard-drive/q/loc/101/210992929.html

but any aluminum enclosure will likely work just as well for your use.

Also consider using a drive dock in lieu of an enclosure:

$18 EZ-Dock 2.5" / 3.5" SATA Hard Drive USB 2.0 Docking Station
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0314844

(I own a few of these. Some models support eSATA.) You'll need to figure 
out a temporary sleeve or enclosure for the drive when you transport it, 
but many OEM drives these days come with reusable plastic shells that 
would serve the purpose nicely. The advantage to this approach is that 
you can just buy any commodity bare drive and not be concerned with how 
it is packaged or assembling it into a case, and you can add additional 
drives into the rotation without buying extra enclosures.

In theory, going with a 2.5" drive made for notebooks might also get you 
a drive with more shock resistance than a 3.5" drive (check the specs), 
but the cost premium (or capacity hit) may not be worth it.

I'd also recommend using an eSATA interface instead of USB, if your 
machine supports it. (You can add an eSATA jack for cheap if you have a 
free internal SATA port and card slot.) Your backups will run faster, 
and modern kernels do seem to be able to handle hot swapping eSATA devices.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/