External hard drives

When your external hard drive fails, as one of mine did, it is difficult to salvage anything. With these pre-enclosed drives, the entire thing is probably bound for the dump. I believe a better solution is to enclose your own drive. It is cheaper, you can select what hard drive you want, and you can reuse the enclosure if the hard drive ever does fail. I picked the belkin enclosure because it has plenty of room for the hard drive and for air to circulate, is firewire (2 ports to daisy chain), and has a fan built in. I decided on a Samsung hard drive for reliability.

enclosure: read
hard drive: read