external USB drive recs (Re: [ILUG] OT: mirroring an external drive)

[Justin Mason]

Conor Daly writes:
> On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 01:33:07PM -0400 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
> Brendan Kehoe thought:
> > I've got a Seagate 1TB Maxtor Central Axis external drive to do 
> > network-based backups of a bunch of things at home.  My fear, of course, 
> > is having a single drive doing all of the work, with the single point of 
> > failure and all that.
> 
> A single backup drive is not a single point of failure.  If the backup
> drive fails, you still have your running machines.  Just go get a new
> backup drive and start again.  Nothing lost.

Talking of backup external HDs -- I have a couple of USB2 drives for
backups, and yes, I rsync (parts) of one drive onto the other for
redundancy.  Great idea.

However, recently, one of them starting throwing disk errors; an fsck
indicated unreadable sectors with suspiciously contiguous numbering.
Once I unmounted, powered cycled the drive, and re-fsck'd, the errors
were gone.  Out of paranoia, I've replaced the drive -- and guess what,
the same thing happened with the replacement just a couple of days
ago.

So anyway, I now suspect the USB HD enclosure, probably it's failing to
provide adequate cooling.  So I want to replace that. Can anyone recommend
a reliable enclosure for plain old PATA -> USB2?  Low power consumption
is pretty important fwiw, and I of course already have a disk to put
in it...

--j.