Seagate Technology 200 GB USB 2.0 and FireWire External Drive ( ST3200823A-RK )
Too early to tell, so far so good....
I'm a car guy, not a computer guy, and I wish that for every piece of online advice telling me to build my own hard drive, I could have advised people to rebuild their own engines.     OK. I wanted a straightforward external drive to store the usual pictures, music, etc, and I was surprised to discover that narrowing the list down to a few worthy candidates was much more difficult than I thought. For every drive that got a rave review, there was more than one alternate viewpoint that said it was the worst electronic device ever made. That was true of this Seagate drive as well, though it had the best balance (on Amazon, at least) of good versus bad reviews.    Setting up the drive itself on Mac OSX was mostly a breeze, though the initializing instructions that came with the drive didn't exactly jibe with what was actually on screen. The difference was something minor--I think the instructions said to click \\"initialize,\\" while the on-screen button was marked \\"erase.\\" I believe that all the drives are shipped with PC formatting, and reformatting for Mac is necessary.     The drive, though advertised at 200GB, has about 185 GB once it's initialized and ready to go. From my understanding that's pretty much standard fare for external drives.     I have it hooked up via FireWire, and it's plenty fast--the only thing that has been really time-consuming so far was the very first complete backup. The backup software that comes with the drive is called BounceBack, and it's a bit balky--I haven't yet figured out how to set preferences for automatic backup and such.     So far, the only real complaint I have is a minor one--I have the drive sitting next to my computer, and it does make constant noise when its working. It's no louder than the computer itself, but its noticable. I have no basis for comparison, but it's a bit louder than I expected.     I'll give it 4 stars because of the noise, but operation so far has been seamless. Knock on wood, as far as I can tell no one makes a foolproof external drive.