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

[Tim]

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 had some unidentifiable brand of hard drive enclosure with a Seagate
drive in it that died on me some time ago (the drive gets multiplying
read errors).  And I want to find a decent replacement, without a silly
price, or a crappy fan that's going to make annoying noises or seize up.

You try to be diligent, doing your backups to an external drive, then
the backup drive is the thing to go west!  :-\  Thank goodness I have
the original files to back up the backup...  And, yes, the drive got
treated with kid gloves, and I don't expect hard drives to be treated
any other way.

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.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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