I’m tempted, but based on the pictures, it looks like that drive would be a giant monolith on my desk. (Is it as big as it looks?)
I’m thinkin’ I should put the Hitachi on the Hibachi, 'cuz reliability has always been suspect…
due to un- re- liable disc controllers…
I’d guess it’s about as big as it looks, which is to say, about 1 inch deep, 4 inches wide and 5.75 inches high.
Whenever I look at a hard drive bigger than 500GB, the saying Don’t put all your eggs in one basket comes up every time.
Is the the only way to connect this through USB?
I bought one.
Warranty: 3 Year Hitachi
Better than sticking my head up a butchers ass!
Really take my word for it?
Uses a power cord/brick, does not use powered USB.
This WAS the case back when Hitachi took over IBM’s incredibly shoddy hard drive business, but in the time since, Hitachi has built a reputation as probably the most reliable HDD manufacturer in the consumer market.
I didn’t believe it myself when I saw the independent studies, especially after my bad experiences with IBM and early (identical) Hitachi drives that literally NEVER lasted more than a year, but apparently they’ve really stepped up their game.
In the interest of full disclosure though, I own 11 hard drives and they are ALL western digital. Many of them I had collected while still under the assumption that Hitachi was making the same garbage they were nearly a decade ago, but I recently built a new computer with 6 x 1TB Caviar Blacks (the SATA3 edition with the 64mb cache), 4 of which make up a RAID 10 array. WD is still fairly reliable, but I was willing to sacrifice a bit of that reliability for the performance of caviar blacks - especially since the redundant array provides more “reliability” than any single HDD ever could.
But the real point is that Hitachi’s history of building drives that you’d be lucky to have last 8 months (especially soon after taking over from IBM) has almost no bearing on the drives they build today. And it’s the construction, rather than the controller, that really influences drive failure in almost all cases. The controller is more often responsible for data integrity, transfer speeds, etc. I’d even consider buying this, except that I now have a PC that supports USB 3.0 and insist on external drives/enclosures that support it (and even before then, I’d insist on eSATA - USB 2.0 is just far too slow for the kind of transfers you might be using a 1TB drive for.)
And a 3-year warranty isn’t so bad, though again this is where I prefer the 5-year warranty of the caviar blacks (even if they DO tend to fail a bit more quickly). I remember back when Hitachi drives were still IBM, they even stated that their drives weren’t intended to be used 24/7 and wouldn’t last a year if used in such a way!
You need at least 2 baskets, whether big or small.
Hmm… there’s not a 3.5 external drive on the planet that’s powered through USB. All 3.5" drives use an external power adapter.
That’s because a USB port only has 5 volts running to it, not even close enough to power these “desktop” size drives.
You must be confused with 2.5" “notebook sized” external drives that are powered through a USB port.
Most external 3.5" drives are about the size of a thick hardcover novel. Not too bad really.
And sitting on a desktop they don’t take up too much space. (Plus the lights look cool.)
You mean terabyte 
Any reason this wouldn’t work with a Boxee Box?
By the way, Grassroots Computers, through the Sellout Woot listings on the front page once every so often sell Western Digital 500GB, USB powered 2.5" external drives (that measure 4.5" x 3" x .5") for $45, with free shipping.
When that sale runs I buy two to three of those drives because they are such a good deal.
Keep an eye out for those. Sometimes Grassroots will run a Google ad advertising this as a Woot sale.
Western Digital calls them “My Passport” drives.
IMHO it’s pretty cool having 500GB drives that are shirt pocket small and weigh 5 oz (according to my kitchen scale I got on Woot).