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

[Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak]

On 07/16/2009 09:58 AM, Tim wrote:
> 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 found USB drives to be hugely unreliable. I ended up removing the 
disks from their enclosures and using them inside the main computer 
chassis, like a normal drive.

I think something is buggy with the USB drive implementation, though I 
don't know what exactly (kernel driver, enclosure electronics, who knows...)

You might have better luck with eSATA drives, rather than USB.

For my backups, I prefer to use something like rsnapshot 
(http://rsnapshot.org/) to copy files to a remote live computer. This 
works very well and very reliably, for me.

- Mike