Two of my external hard drives have died in recent weeks. I have a total of 4 external drives: a Maxtor 300GB drive used at work, an old AMS 60GB formatted with HFS+ (for Hongyun's iBook), a 60GB Hitachi Travelstar in a cheap third party case, and a 300GB drive in another cheap third party case. Guess which ones died? That's right...the ones in cheap third party cases.

I've been hearing about issues with third party cases having pretty cheap circuitry and unstable power supplies which eventually lead to drive failure. Now, I definitely believe it. The two drives that I bought already in cases are still going strong, but the two that have external cases have both died (within a month of each other no less). Anyway, this is just another example of "you get what you pay for."

Now I have to go look for nice external drive cases that won't kill my replacement drives (assuming I can get them replaced under warranty).