Quote:
Originally Posted by Sailor Steve
The odd part is that I just looked Amazon UK and I thought they were more expensive there until I looked on Amazon.com as well. I must have lucked into a sale or something because I paid a lot less than that when I got mine.
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It's because of the floods in Thailand a while ago. HD production dropped considerably and prices are still influenced by lack of supply today.
While I'm here... I was trying to stay out of this because it's next to impossible to recommend an external HD you have no experience with: imho the most important thing is the enclosure, specifically the cooling, and no review ever bothers to test the environmental conditions inside these enclosures.
A HD that is in operation for extended periods, such as when copying large amounts of data, streaming media or during gaming, can heat up a lot. In my old case I saw temps of 50-55C, and that had a fan right next to them (general airflow in the case was very poor though). If you just use the drive for back-ups, copying bits of data now and then, heat isn't such an issue since the drive will spend most of it's time in standby. But if it is going to spend a lot of time actively, some degree of cooling is, imo, a must.
I think you would get best mileage from buying an empty, well build and actively cooled enclosure and stuffing a drive of your choice in it. Drawback there is that it is likely the most expensive solution.
Most of the pre-built things have lower RPM, energy-friendly (slower but less heat) drives, but with something like USB it normally isn't an issue since that doesn't really support high transfer rates. If you have a fancier connection, like FireWire or eSATA (or USB 3), you can use higher performance drives but cooling becomes a much bigger concern.
I believe that in most cases where someone reports an external HD dying in short order it was because of heat; a failure of the enclosure rather than the drive. These things are build to very exact tolerances, and metal tends to expand quite a bit when heated: you need to keep those things cool if you want them to survive for an extended period.