Off topic, I have a 1TB external drive built by Comstar. When choosing an external drive the first piece of information I wanted to find out was what kind of hard drives were in it. I can't remember the brand name off hand now (since it was 2 years ago) but I believe it was either a Western Digital or Seagate. The reviews for the drive were good enough for me to buy it.
About a year into it I noticed that I had trouble reading certain files and the drive would get very slow at times. I'm not sure if its just the drive is failing, or it has become corrupted somehow. Within Windows you can configure external drives so that you have to safely remove them or quick disconnect. The trade off is performance, such that write caching is disabled if you want to be able to quickly disconnect it. Even tho I had this option enabled, each time I tried to dismount the drive Windows would complain. I would check task manager but nothing would be accessing files on the drive so I would just power it off. I'm wondering if this caused corruption over time.
This past weekend I bought a 1TB Lacie drive and am in the process of moving all my files off the old drive. After all my files (hopefully) have been moved i'll take a closer look at the drive and see if its recoverable. It may take awhile tho!
