On Mon, 5 Apr 2010 14:01:07 +0000 (UTC), Jules Richardson wrote:

I had/have a Seagate (250GB) one. Niggles included the fact that it used
a bulky wall-wart rather than integrated PSU (and "kettle lead"),

Can't see why this kit would need a kettle lead a small fig 8 one
would do but I agree integrated PSU would be nice but that adds to
the cost. They can't just automatically make 10 million identical
units and then "regionalise" them by just adding the wall wart for
the destination region when they are manually packaged.

Having a USB powered device would be nice, no wall wart but I think
the negatives out weigh that convience. The negatives being that the
drive will probably be "laptop" spec and I can't site the drive
remotely from the server that it is backing up.

the fact that it was tall and thin (so could be knocked over easily),

That particular Seagate sits flat.

and the fact that it'd automatically spin down after x minutes of
inactivity (increasing potential for failure - drives generally don't
like lots of stop-start cycles)

Depends what makes it spin back up again. I have NAS drive in a cheap
enclosure but it is slow. A full back up takes around 18hrs for 30
odd Gig, the same drive in a networked PC only took a couple of
hours. The spin down delay time is configurable think I have it set
to 5 mins and AFAICT it doesn't spin up unless you really try to
access the drive. ie windows network chatter "I'm here, are you?"
stuff doesn't spin it back up.

--
Cheers
Dave.