On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 7:10 AM, Mike Cloaked<mike.cloaked@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I have been using a Seagate FreeAgent Go external usb drive for this purpose > for some time and has worked flawlessly. With all due respect, while most people here keep mentioning "brand names" it means diddly squat. What is important is the USB-to-IDE _CHIPSET_ used inside those enclosures. Nothing guarantees that Seagate won't use a chipset "a" on its 500GB drives and several months down the line switch to some other chipset from another brand that does USB+eSATA or whatever... What you get from a brand name is the quality and looks of the plastic enclosure, and maybe power supply (internal or external etc). But in the end, you have a normal hard drive inside (Western Digital or Seagate, most of the time), and a USB-to-IDE _chipset_. That's what you should care about. Performance and reliability between different usb-to-ide chipsets varies widely. The best performance I found has been with a Made-in-Taiwan enclosure using the Genesis Logic GL811E chipset. Yet it had random lockups when I used it on Win2k. The most reliable? The the ALI M5621 Chipset, but which is significantly slower. Look at this page for all the various USB-to-IDE chipsets used inside all those external USB hard drives and enclosures http://2xod.com/articles/USB_Enclosure_Benchmarks/ And by all means do readthe following horror stories for devices which use a particular revision of a Cypress USB-to-IDE chipset http://daltrey.org/linux/cypress.html FC -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines