As for Hitachi drives, I've provided links for recent widespread problems with Seagate drives. Can you provide links that reference widespread problems with Hitachi drives? I haven't heard of any. [/QUOTE[
My avoidance of Hitachi drives runs back to the 'DeathStar' products they bought from IBM, I had the misfortune to have two of them fail on me. While this was back in the dim past, the general impression it left of Hitachi was poor.
I guess this is as reasonable as saying all Seagate drives are bad because of one set of drives that fail, or in the Seagate case had a firmware issue.
Among my many tech-fanatic friends Seagate and WD seem the drives of choice and anecdotally the most reliable. Add to this I work in distributed computing and hang our with people that run data centres. They seem to favour both WD and Seagate drives as well (for petabyte-scale storage) and they are people I trust.
Hitachi's enterprise-class drives are designed to be a cut above ordinary consumer hard drives.
Somehow I suspect WD RE drives and Seagate Barracuda ES drives are designed in the same way.
If you are saying Enterprise>consumer that is different to Hitachi>Seagate and WD.
RE the macintosh bible - It is my deeply cynical nature that makes me investigate claims in people signatures
in part because I am interested in the impression those claims are meant to cause (I am fascinated by online social structures). As it happens I could find no ref online to your authorship of TMB, other than on sites where you appeared to have provided the info. I did find you Mac legal office book on
Amazon though.
Lastly and back on Topic, (and EDCC beat me to the punch so I just echo his advice), assembling external drives is extremely easy, just ensure the enclosure and drive match (as in both SATA or both IDE/PATA) and have a small Phillip's screwdriver for the drive mounting screws. There is only one way it will plug together and it fairly obvious