[jj88]

I have heard that enterprise hard drives are more reliable than the standard hard drives in retail or consumer computers. I want to get an external hard drive for extra storage and backup purposes. My desktop and notebooks are the typical computers that are sold to retail customers. Will there be any problems having it access and drive an enterprise hard drive in an external hard drive case? I am thinking to get a fairly large size around 1T so I figure it would have its own power supply and not be powered by the USB drive. Data access will probably be via USB and/or eSata.

[loserOlimbs]

I believe Enterprise drives are more performance based then reliability based. The mechanics are still the same. Usually an enterprise application requires a fast drive, something like a 16MB cache and 15k RPMs is the norm, even if the drive is only 150GB, put those in RAID and you have a very fast access source for a large network.

There of course are slower, and larger backup drives, and tape backups as well... but again I can't imagine that they are any more reliable, if the two drives are comarable in other regards. SATA is Still SATA, though Fibre and SAS might be more reliable than SATA or PATA.

[jj88]

Thanks for the reply. If the enterprise drive advantages are more in the area of performance than reliability then I think I will just stick with a regular consumer version and save some money. My main goal for the external hard drive was as a backup drive for storage so performance isn't that critical.