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 agree with that. The drives in the external USB casing are just the same as fitted internally on your computer. The only problem I've had (so far) was with a noname external drive casing which went bad. I took the drive out and fitted it in a computer and it works fine. Now I stick to big name external drives (LACIE, Western Digital, Verbatim..)

All my "finished" photography files are on external drives. I stick to consumer quality external drives but I change about every 18 months as my collection grows (300MB > 500MB > 1TB). I reuse the old drives for other things (example: as a Pivot)

Reply to Jetrim: the bigger external drives hold the 3.5 inch disks you find in a desktop and the smaller external drives hold the 2.5 inch disks you get in a laptop. The cooling fan (when fitted) is usually at one end next to the vent in the casing. The amount of "shock protection" in all the drives I've opened has been minimal (a tiny slice of foam plastic).