External USB drives...

My short rant on external USB hard drives.
First off...allot of people seem to think that by moving their data to an external drive that data is automatically safer than an internal drive.
While it may keep your data isolated from the drive that hosts your OS there by protecting your data from loss in the event of an OS failure... it still is in my opinion a quasi backup solution.
Ive recently run into a rash of friends and clients that have come to me seeking to recover data from a damaged external USB drive.
Its seems to me that if you don't need to physically cart around your data, these external dives bring more trouble than simply installing an additional internal drive.
its a given that a hard drive housed in an external USB enclosure could be the exact same make and model of the one inside the computer case....however its been my experience that the external drive is the one that is more likely to fail without warning, and probably much sooner than its internal counterpart.
External USB drives (the enclosure in particular) like anything else have a wide range of build quality... and some of them are just junk.
Everything from the power adaptor to the USB connector cable, internal wiring, power switch and the housing/enclosure itself all contribute to the health of the hard drive inside the enclosure.
If you drop one of these drives, flick that cheap power switch one to many times, or rest the already hot enclosure on the top of a hot CRT monitor, or desktop sub woofer, or worse still under the desk where it will quite be literally be kicked!
The hard drive inside will fail, and there may be no easy way of recovering the data.
If you don't need the portability consider an internal drive your computer will have much faster access to your data and it wont get dropped, the only downside is you may need someone to install it for you.
If you do need the portability think about how much data you need to move around and consider a solid state USB thumb drive, which are now available in fairly large capacities like 64GB.
And if you do buy an external hard drive do some research and consider one the has a 2.5inch hard drive.
the enclosures are much smaller and they can be often powered by USB alone eliminating the need to for a bulky power adaptor.
The rest depends on the shock resistance of the enclosure/hard drive and the way the owner managers the device.
Anyway that's my rant.

I`m 60% geek.
I make my living in the Information Technology industry.
I dual boot my desktop and laptop machines With Linux and Windows and I`m always comparing the latest Windows and Linux offerings.
Windows invariably ends up as my primary OS because there is no other OS that allows me to do everything so easily.
To get any version of Linux to the same level of Windows do evethingness takes weeks if not months.
Eventually I hit the wall of Linux application incompatibility, and boot back into Windows because I don't feel like loosing another day of my life researching a workaround for something that I could do within a few minutes in Windows.
The thing that I find Ironic, is that I put some of my less than technical friends and family on Linux... their needs are very basic compared to mine, and they have a hard time messing up Linux just by surfing the internet.
Which means allot less free "just call Dieter support" and headaches for me.
In my opinion Windows is easier to customize and in the hands of an expert you can get it to do anything... speedy, secure and stable with far less effort than Linux.
Right now I`m using the latest versions of Open Suse, Ubuntu and Windows 7.
I`m VERY impressed with Windows 7, its Linux fast and it runs all of my applications and hardware out of the box.
I think that the Linux distros are improving at a faster rate than Windows, but in my opinion Linux has still got a long way to go before it can become my primary OS.