External Drive

In preparation to upgrading to a new OS and needing to image my current drive, as well as serving as a new drive for my nightly backups (the current old PATA 80GB drive is getting too small) I'm looking to get a new external drive. An external also serves as the, my house is burning and I need to save my data, device; much easier than lugging the entire PC around.

I'm looking for a drive of 1TB. That should hold all my backups as well as serve as media storage.

This does preclude me from getting one of those snazzy flask size drives that you can stick in your shirt pocket. Those are based on a 2.5" laptop drive, but don't have the storage capacity I'm looking for. They also hook up with 2 USB cables (just 1 for the data transfer, 2 to get enough power to avoid an external power source), convenient, but I'm looking for the better transfer speed of eSATA.

So, 1TB, eSATA. That leaves just one big question: buy one straight off the shelf or build my own.

Off the shelf
Pros

• Cheaper - around $90*
• Presumably it has been tested to work reliably between the drive and enclosure.

Cons

• No idea what HDD you're getting.

Custom
Pros

• Can buy exactly the HDD you want. RPM and cache.

Cons

• More expensive. You have to buy a HDD (~$100) and an enclosure (~$30)
• May be some odd reliability/configuration issues between the two pieces.

Naturally, I chose to build my own.

While there is certainly a certain ease in just buying one off the shelf, I just wasn't comfortable not knowing anything about the HDD that came inside.

Given a $90 price point, presumably the enclosure costs some money. If it's sold to be at $30 (which does seem a bit inflated), they must be spending, say, $5 on it. That leaves $85 for the cost of the HDD and their profit. I'm guessing I'm going to be getting an older HDD, without much cache.

Now, for a little bit more money I can go ahead and specify the exact HDD I want, know what the RPM and cache will be. Toss in an enclosure and it should just plug right in without any problems.

Heck, I can buy any HDD and pair it with any mobo without worrying about compatibility. I'd assume enclosures are as worry free.

In the end I went with a Rosewill enclosure as I've purchased other accessories by them before with good luck. Wanting eSATA and 3.5" size drove the price up a bit from a cheap $8 to $30. A bit inflated I think, but I hope it has good reliability.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182179

For drive choice I went with a Caviar Black as it seems to be leading the 1TB pack right now in terms of performance.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=488
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17812

The parts have arrived and I've assembled them quickly and without any hassles. The enclosure is solid feeling and looks good. No complaints. The drive seems just fine. I'm not using this in any performance centric application at the moment (despite my reasoning based on performance when buying it) so I assume it's just fine.

Now it's time to point my backups to this drive and image my hard drive before I upgrade.

* Prices are for early March '10 when I was looking around. Now they're even cheaper.