On Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:26:41 GMT, "Vincent D. DeSimone"
wrote:

What are the books, DVDs, toys, computer programs, magazines,
et cetera that the space-history or space-exploration enthusiast should
definitely be getting this holiday season if they haven't got them
already?

A 1 TB hard drive in order to keep piling on those sci.space videos and
PDFs.

....A caveat to those buying 1TB or 500GB HD's this Chrisnukkah: a
while back I advised everyone to avoid Seagate drives because of
quality control issues. From what I'm gathering from some tech buddies
of mine, the caveat still stands. Unless the drive has a 3-year
warranty - and a lot of them only have 1 year ones - don't risk it,
because after about 14 months they'll suffer a head crash. Problem
appears to be contaminants in the air during final assembly this time,
as opposed to the previous problem where janitors were cleaning the
white rooms with solvents that outgassed and contaminated the platters
there during the platter manufacturing process. Apparently the same
problem is now occurring in the final assembly rooms, and while
they've corrected the problem "this time for sure", all those suddenly
cheap drives are cheap for a reason other than the fact that the
entire storage industry is about to switch to SSD drives.

....Another caveat is this: if you see a bare drive for sale, see what
the cost is for a same-sized drive with an external case. I'm finding
that the pre-assembled external drives are running $10-$15 USD cheaper
than getting a bare drive and putting it in a new case. Granted, you
won't have the choice of what your case will look like, but every
little bit saved in today's economy helps.



OM
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