From: lars@beagle-ears.com   
      
   The recent story about "incredible" hard drive prices at Walmart   
   was interesting. The product page did say that the product was shipped   
   to customers from a 3rd party vendor in China/HongKong/Taiwan. The price   
   was less than what similar offshare vendors charge for the better   
   enclosures (without a drive). So yes, clearly this would be trash.   
      
   After a recent rebuild of my main computers (one Windows, one Linux)   
   I was looking at external drives to use with them, and discovered   
   that my nice, recent 6TB external drive (SeaGate Backup+ Hub) will not   
   to SMART on my Linux system, although it apparently will on Windows.   
   At least on Windows, I can read the SMART attributes with the SeaTools   
   utility, but the Linux version of SeaTools does not show a SMART tab.   
   "smartctl -a /dev/sd?" says SMART is "available but disabled".   
   The drive inside is a "Firecuda" which has a full complement of SMART   
   data.   
      
   So I am looking at (empty) external enclosures. Cheap Chinese products   
   start at $10/unit, at $16/unit some decent ones are stocked at Amazon   
   warehouses for next day delivery, but those are disappointing. Half of   
   them have bad reliability histories with several customer reviews saying   
   they died after about 4 months, and the other half do not support SMART.   
   The ones that do have good reliabilty and SMART support are closer to   
   $60/unit.   
      
   Any experience and recommendations?   
      
   --   
   Lars Poulsen - an old geek in Santa Barbara, California   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)