One week is pretty good for a replacement. I don't think I've ever had one that fast.

The drives in external units are the same as internal ones so I doubt there is much difference. You were probably just unlucky.

But it might have been the interface in the unit just as much as the HD itself that failed. I've heard of the firmware in external drives corrupting and killing a drive. In such situations external enclosures are useful as you could just take the drive out and directly connect it to the PC to see if the HD itself is still OK.
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I know that, I already disassembled some, even a CD drive to replace it with a DVD. But perhaps due to the interface that converts the firewire/USB to PATA has some issues and destroys the disk.

Also this Maxtor drive has no on/off button, only an on/off switch, meaning when the drive has finished its actions, you have to switch/power it off, which could be bad for the disk when it still writes/reads. Not parking properly or something like that.
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Oh that isn't such a good design. Many of the current external USB HDs now power on and off with the host system so there is less danger of accidentally switching it off during a read or write operation.
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One WD I have has a small button in front of the case, where you can switch it on/off, works perfect. It doesn't start with the main system though, but I prefer that, mostly it's switched off, and when I do a backup, I switch it on.

The other WD I have is the My Book edition, which has a big button on the front plate, and it works too. That's the one where I store my Amiga files, so I don't need it a lot. But this one also starts with a system restart, which annoys me, because I don't want that.

I saw that the new series of WD external disks now are called Elements, they have a very nice design, and are not expensive, only 134€ for 500GB, that's 0.27€/GB.
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I haven't seen those Elements drives yet. Will have to have a look. That is definitely cheap for 500GB.
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