My personal experience is that lack of power does kill drives. It doesn't have to be a total power loss, but running drives in a machine which is short of power kills. I had 2 drive losses and also a number of friends who lost their drives due to insufficient power. After I changed my PSU to a higher capacity Antec, I have not had a single drive loss since (touch wood).

Also bear in mind that USB casings are a potential drive hazard. USB supplies a maximum of 500 miliamps per port which is sometimes short of the power required by the typical laptop drive. The infamous ICN25 series from Hitachi (i had 2) requires about 900 at powerup, which is above what most USB ports can supply and an average seek power of 500. To be safe, get one with dual USB leads or even better one that supports an external power brick.

Just my RM0.02..

This post has been edited by lex: Feb 13 2006, 11:44 AM