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

[John Austin]

On Fri, 2009-07-17 at 18:04 -0400, Braden McDaniel wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-07-16 at 23:28 +0930, Tim wrote:
> > Does anybody know if the "WD Elements" hard drives in enclosures with
> > USB ports work with Fedora pain free?  I've heard tales of some drive
> > enclosures that go asleep on you, but can't recall if it were this range
> > of models, and there's some of these on sale locally for a reasonable
> > price.
> 
> I think buying an external enclosure and drive separately is a better
> option.
> 
> My experience with the quality of drives sold as "external drives" has
> not been good.  Check the warranty periods on the external drives you're
> looking at.  They're typically just for one or two years; occasionally
> three years.  The WD Elements drive you're looking at appears just to
> have a one year warrany[1].  Meanwhile, look at the warranty periods for
> most internal SATA drives: they're typically at least three years; and
> it's not too hard to find drives with five year warranties.
> 
> Buying the drive separately from the enclosure means that you can get a
> higher quality, more reliable drive.
> 
> [1] http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp?wdc_lang=en
> 
> -- 
> Braden McDaniel <braden at endoframe.com>
> 

I would totally agree that buying separate "box" and "disk" is a
better plan.
I would probably go further and say buy an eSATA enclosure, separate disk
and a USB to eSATA converter

Then comes the problem mentioned earlier - what chip is in the converter?

My Lindy eSATA adapter shows up as 13fd:160e Initio Corporation
The only chip on their web site is INIC-1605
However 13fd seems to be Micro Science Inc not Initio Corporation
which is listed as 1101

In practice my machine will copy a 2.4GB file
from int SATA disk to ext SATA disk at approx 50MB/s eSATA
and 25MB/s with the USB/eSATA adapter

OT
OCZ Throttle memory stick - has USB and eSATA I/F
eSATA I/F
[root at naxos ~]# hdparm -t /dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  268 MB in  3.00 seconds =  89.28 MB/sec

USB I/F 152d:0602 JMicron Technology Corp
/dev/sdb1:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  102 MB in  3.05 seconds =  33.48 MB/sec

John