*From:* OM
*Date:* Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:33:41 -0600

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.

The problem with buying the pre-assembled external hard drives is that if
you need the drive inside there's no guarantee that you'll be able to get
at it without destroying the case. That happened to me with a Western
Digital Mybook.

So now I always buy bare drives and cheap external cases. This is even
cheaper if you pick a case with USB2 and ESATA, the external drives carry
a bigger premium the more interfaces you want.