BleepingComputer.com: Three External hard drives for backup now, but I hope for consolidation in the future

Hi all,
I've been doing a bit of research on some stuff pertaining to backup. i'm very happy with my three drives I use right now, though one of my contacts warned me that external drives, especially those made by Seagate, can easily perish in their own heat. My Seagate is my 1 TB drive, and it has fallen once up in NH when my family and a friend of mine were away up there. My two other drives, one is a WD 596 GB drive, it has been recently causing little issues where files get dropped off. My last drive, which is a simple tech 465 GB drive, hasn't had any issues yet. I know that in a few years, I'm going to need replacements of these little guys. I can't decide between two Seagate Black Armor WS110 drives, or one Dell PowerVault RD 1000 backup unit with a few of those removable cartridges in it that add up to the same amount of storage space. Both solutions could easily either connect to my laptop or my PowerEdge Server at home. What do you guys think? Thanks.

Chromebuster

Heat is a known issue with many external drives. Poor design\lack of proper ventilation.

The internal drives are really no different then those you would purchase for use inside a PC.

My primary suggestion I make to anyone who wants an external drive is to get one with a cooling fan built in.

Others will suggest an on\off switch as well as an independent power supply. Meaning it uses a wall outlet for it`s power source.

Of course your final purchase is based on your portability needs and pocketbook.

The simple fact is that external drives are not intended to be used non-stop as internal drives are. They are designed to be used if and when needed (ie, to backup data). I have a half dozen external drives, one almost 10 years old, and have never had any issues with any of them.

Thanks for the information. Which brands of external hard drives have fans built into them? I didn't know such things existed. I thought that you had to buy separate drive enclosures for that to work. Another thought I had was something like the Dell PowerVault MD1120, but unfortunately, that's only a rack mount solution, and my server is a tower. Now unless you can sit rack mountable appliances on the desk or on the floor, I don't know how that'd work. My server is not exactly at my house yet, but it's coming all right, and right now, it has two 500 GB SATA drives in it, with room for four in a raid 1 configuration. But I'm thinking that if one of it's duties gets too large for it, such as email serving taking up a lot of space, or my web site content taking up a lot of space, I'm going to want to be able to expand. That's what I'm getting at, and if having two of my external drives plugged into it for backup/expansion will just end up killing them, then I'm going to want to have something good.