Ouuuch. So sorry to hear about that Tofu. Personally, I side with Vok. ..

Never. EVER. Trust a hard drive. ... EVER!

Here's my current drive paranoia. I use three firewire 500 gig external Western Digital HDs. Very affordable right now at about a hundred bucks a piece. HD #1 holds everything and is always running. HD #2 acts as a running mirror of HD #1 and backs it up daily. HD #3 is always off and backs up #2 weekly. The oldest of the three HD's is always HD #1. Each HD is mandatorily retired after only two years from date of purchase running or not. When a HD is retired, it is swiped clean, then placed on a drill press, and drilled through, and only then is it tossed or given to the recyclers.

My HD routine is inexpensive, and has saved my bacon many many times.

_

EXACTLY WHAT I RELIGIOUSLY PRACTICE TOO...ALTHOUGH I TAKE A TWO STROKE GAS POWERED SAW TO IT (USED TO CUT DUCTILE IRON IN THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY)...CUTS LIKE BUTTER AND ALLOWS ME TO SLEEP AT NIGHT KNOWING ALL THAT P O R N IS GONE (oops did I say that out loud ..?).....Basically stopping problems BEFORE they happen......
...great minds huh ???

~5150

Drills and saws?!? What happened to the good ole days of a 30-30 or a .308 round?

Oh I don't know. Neighbors, children, police, swat teams, that sort of thing maybe?

Besides, if I went the rifle route, I'd opt for a rifled slug and a good 12 gauge. Much more dramatic than a 30-30.

This is the only portable I use, I have several of them. One big advantage for me is the 7200 RPM disk. It works well even when editing video. No external power and it's USB or Firewire.

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DRIVE-mini.cfm

in by portable.. do yo mean? ( size dimensions ) i use a western digital " external " hard drive it has built in sleep mode and a fan but is a tad bigger that an internal drive... ( casing included ) 250 gig and i got it @ circuit city a year ago for i think 80 bucks?

the cool thing i liked about it when using a pc... was the fact it came w/ a google software pre installed on it... and was very similar to apples finder.

it works both on macs and pcs... when on a pc you can install progs and use a bridge... mac it is well aplug and play on both..
havent tried it w/ linux...

i hope that helps

wow that's intense, so you do top secret government work or something...

huh... thats weird i thought t-mac was a dairy farmer???

Nah. Just digital overkill and a sense of trust no one/believe nothing paranoia.

And the incentive to hide all that illegal dairy-porn.


Somewhat good news. I hooked the drive up to the IDE/SATA adapter at work and it reads just fine!

So it looks like the original SATA-to-USB adapter board in the drive housing is crap. For $15-$20 I can get an adapter like we have at work. The upside to that is I'll have storage to spare thanks to all my old drives hanging around.

got a 400gb freecom usb disk, works great, a bit heavy but so far very reliable, got it 1 year ago.

I've never had problems with external drives, but then again, I didn't carry them around that much.
So far I've always been working with 7200 RPM-Drives covered in an Icy-box.
For those who don't know what an Icy Box is, it's a small case, a bit bigger then a harddrive in where you can put a SATA or ATA (IDE) Harddrive and it will convert it to Firewire or USB.
It basicly makes your internal Harddrive external and you can take it with you.
It has ofcourse, pro's and con's, just depends what works best for you.

Another external harddrive I can recommend, is Lacie.
'Lacie Porsche' has quite a wide variety here in Europe and during my days in a IT-company, Lacie was the brand which barely ever returned for repairs or errors.
So I recommend it + it's quite cheap. (I recommend Firewire above USB)

Oh and Tarmac, no need to drill a harddrive to get rid of it's information.
We used to have this little magnet which we put on top of it to instantly 'crash' the harddrive

It even works if you put it on your laptop.. a little bit of a magnetic field will do the job.

i have a welders magnetic clamp, you pay for the posage it's yours, only way 45lbs