Well, I’ve had not one, but two seagates fail on me tonight, though I *think* it’s only the interfaces, and will be trying them internally when the PC shop opens to sell me some SATA cables.

But, this leaves me with a bit of a headache, as they need replacing. Does anyone have any preferred brands for external HDs?

Qnapp 112 NAS with Western Digital Caviar SATA HDD. If you want to mirror the drives you can go for a 2 drive NAS buy different brand drives for each bay – reduces the (low) risk of both failing at the same time. Never had a WD Caviar fail on me.

I think the disks themselves are fine (no usual tell-tale clunking), but I guess I’ll find out tomorrow!

Not in a position to get a NAS set up now, but when I do, I’ve got my eve on a 5-6 disk enclosure with RAID 5

That said, most of my ‘failures’ over the years seem to have been the interface, which has me slightly worried about a RAID system…

No idea re brnads but got a 1TB western from Currys for £40 after discount last week.