[Leica] Consensus on external hard drives

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

Any piece of electronics can fail. Most large packaged external hard drives 
have more than one physical drive inside, and the bridge connecting them, 
being a piece of electronics, can fail. It probably would have worked to put 
those 250GB drives individually into a USB BYO enclosure and mounting them 
one at a time. And the bridge board is an easily replaced unit.

In my experience, temperature and vibration (in that order) are the most 
toxic to electronics.

I have two 500GB LaCie units, but I also have a spare IDE bridge in case one 
of them fries.

The LaCie 1TB units, which are newer (and more expensive) seem to have fewer 
reports of failures of the electronics inside.

And LaCie is very good about providing parts for do-it-yourself or 
out-of-warranty repairs.