Once upon a time, back in the early Mac days... there was a drive manufacturer called Jasmine. They made about the best damn drives money could buy. Every time there was a review of drives, Jasmine came out on top. And their prices were good as well. Well, Jasmine, like most external drive makers, didn't actually made the drives inside their boxes, they bought from other makers, stuck them in pretty cases, wrote formatting/partitioning software, and sold them under their name. Jasmine bought internals from a number of companies, Quantum, Segate, Rodime, and others. Well, one day, Rodime shipped Jasmine an entire lot of defective drives (and not a small lot, like thousands and thousands of them). Jasmine, sold these off, after packing them up, and doing their basic burn in. But the defects wouldn't show up until the drives had been run for some time... then Kapow... drive would die. Of course, this would happen about 60 days into good use, right before the 90 day warrenty expired. Suddenly Jasmine found themselves with many an angry customer, wanting a warrenty repair on their drive. More than they could afford to handle. So they tried to push the problem off on Rodime (after all, it was their drive that died), but Rodime denied responsibility, saying Jasmine bought the drives, and it was their problem to test them, and make sure they were good. So Jasmine naturally folded under the massive costs of warrenty repair, leaving everyone (myself included) with a dead drive, and no way to get it fixed. Two good things came of this... 1: Rodime folded not long after because of similar problems (from what I understand at least, I know they closed, and I know they had a massive run of drives they sold to the public go out while under warrenty). So they pretty much got their just dues. 2: A few of the Jasmine techs got together and formed a company, that was one of the first in a soon to grow industry of Data Recovery services of hard drives. They formed the company "Drive Savers" which advertises to this day in the back of most Mac magazines. So after that, I decided that it wasn't worth spending extra money on the best reviewed drive, because even the best reviewed could die and cost you big bucks. I paid $400 on an 80 MB external drive, and was able to use it for about 45 days before it died the first time. I was able to get it going again, and in the end, I got about 8 or 9 months of use of it, before I got sick of it crashing and taking all my data with it. I then replaced the inner drive with a 100 MB Quantum that I paid another $400 for, and used that for a few years, until I replaced it with a 1 gig Quantum (for another $400). Today the lower half of my Jasmine drive case, with its power supply and SCSI connectors, powers my SCSI CD burner that sits loose on top after the power brick for its case died. (and the final 1 g Quantum drive is dead too, stopped spinning up, from the sounds of it, I think it suffered from "sticktion" after having run non stop for a few years, and then being shut off and stored for a few more, the 100 MB Quantum I still have somewhere, and the 80 MB Rodime/Jasmine that was the original, made a very nice wind chime). -chris <http://www.mythtech.net>