Quote Originally Posted by SmartWombat
The drives are the same, if you open up the case and look, as the consumer grade drives.
I don't know what you mean by "real" drives.

I'm considering buying an external SATA interface and using enterprise class drives.
Hopefully they will last longer than consumer grade.
I'm not a computer wiz by any measure, but I'm related to a few. They, and many of my techie friends have advised me to steer well clear of the consumer external drives available today as they suffer an alarmingly high failure rate.

Maybe I've been exceedingly lucky through the years but I've only ever suffered 1 HDD failure on a PATA internal drive that was over 10 years old. I don't buy Maxtor, Seagate, or Western Digital drives though, so that may have something to do with it. Most of the drives I own are Toshiba 3.5" 7200rpm SATA or PATA internal desktop units, so that's what I was referring to as "real drives".

I'm curious though, when you say the drives are the same... the same as desktop drives, or notebook drives? Most of the cases don't appear to be large enough to hold a desktop drive, let alone leave room for cooling and shock protection.