Update on my removable drive troubles.

I tried drilling holes in the case (after opening it and removing the drive, of course) on one of those Seagate FreeAgent drives.  Getting the thing apart was quite a chore, and I had a fun time making a mess drilling holes in the case.  The unit tested fine afterwards when copying small files to it, but it went unresponsive after about three gigabytes of the large file.  It’s difficult to say what went wrong.  I suspect that the USB-to-SATA electronics, which were marginal to begin with, finally gave up the ghost.  At some point I’ll pull out the 1 TB Seagate drive that’s in there and see if I can use it as a normal SATA drive.

Yesterday I picked up two Antec MX-1 external drive enclosures and fitted them with 500 GB drives.  I got them installed last night, and initial results are positive.  I’ve heard that there have been some fan failures with the Antec enclosures, but a search didn’t reveal an inordinate number.  For the price (about $55 each, with tax), I might pick up a third just to keep on hand in case a fan does fail.

The drive comes with USB and eSATA cables.  I was all ready to go eSATA until I discovered that my server doesn’t appear to have a spare SATA port inside.  I suppose I could go eSATA at the office and USB at the datacenter.  I might still do that, although it’ll have to wait until I can take down that office server.  It serves other important duties here, so I can’t just shut it down without affecting a lot of other things.

In any case, I think (hope) that my removable drive troubles are over, at least for a while.