SRS -

I think we've discussed external drives some in other threads. I've not found the common USB-Externals too reliable, having had three failures in 4 drives in the past couple of years.

When LiK's 30 GB hard drive ran out of space, and since I couldn't "add an HD" in her Win2K PC, I got an "External USB Case" and put a standard desktop 160GB drive in it, mirrored the system, and then put the new 160GB drive in the PC with the old 30GB in the case for an "external spare." Thus far good results.

My son had a total HD failure in his Gateway, while they were "visiting for a few days" (now in the 14th month), so when I picked up the replacement I got two new 160GB drives and put one of them in an External USB Case for use as a backup.

I do have one surviving "actual external USB drive" connected to my machine as a second drive.

I find that I can make complete backup copies of all the data from son's 160GB, Lin's 160GB, Lin's 30GB, and My 120GB internal and 180GB external on the one "backup 160GB." (Of course my data is 80% of the load :<)). To mirror the system and programs along with the data would of course take a lot more space.

Especially for a laptop, I believe you can get the "External USB Case" configuration for the smaller "laptop size" Hard Drives. If you got the smaller case and put a "laptop HD" in it, its possible that you'd get much better survival rate in a portable (or dormitory) use. Laptop drives are slower and a little more expensive, but they generally do not leave the read/write arm "hovered" over the disk. The arm returns to a park position between nearly every seek/read/write, so movement of the drive is less likely to cause a scab by hitting the disk surface. Most desktop style HDs now just leave the arm "wherever" until the next seek command, so any physical movement of the drive" when there's power on can damage the disk. (All desktop drives in rememberable history should "Park" the heads when power is off, so they can be moved around with fair safety once everything is stopped.)

You can, of course, get "Portable External USB Drives" that are intended to be "movable" (with care), but I'd expect that they're prettty much just a laptop drive in the external case as I've described. You'd need to check which is more economical, of course.

Any "external drive" can be damaged any time it's moved with power on, or while it's "coasting down" after turnoff; so they need to be treated with extreme caution. Being careful with a "ruggedized" portable drive is still recommended, but you shouldn't have to be quite as paranoid.

Even with a fair number of games, a drive in the 120GB - 180GB range should be sufficient for a kid for a semester in college. If you can train them, they should probably burn their academic backups to CD on a daily basis, simply because academic schedules deman instant recovery when something happens. Nothing ever fails except on the night before the paper is due.

If they're into lots of music, they'll probably really need (I can hear the whine) one of the new Western Digital 1TB drives, but I don't think they can be considered portable. They are less than $1K (US) now though.(?)

John