Hmm...
Maxtor should be avoided (Like IBM/Hitachi) - I've, alone, had several die in the past year (I sillily switched to them from IBM after the DeathStar series, now I'm a WD/Seagate fan). They are also the only company I know of that specifically makes the ultra-shitty ultra-cheap drives for use in DELL and other lowest-quality pcs.
If it were my money, I'd go for this instead:
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s - OEM
Sure, you loose 50gigs, but while the Maxtor is 150mbps, the WD is twice the speed at 300mbps (and has all the other features of SATA-II like NCQ - Native Command Queuing - where the commands are first cached, then put in a more logical order, and then executed, so instead of the drive whipping around the platter 50 times to seek one file, it smoothly goes over the drive once like a record, already knowing where the data is and the linear way to find it. It makes performance faster and also inproves the lifetime) and the price difference means you get free 3-day shipping on the twice-as-fast WD.
http://www.newegg....em=N82E16822144701 As a side note:
Wait a second:
[14:50] Beryl: External 40 gig drive = 180$
[14:53] Beryl: and for that same 180$, on the same site, I can get a sexy slim Aluminium Hard Drive USB2.0 case AND a "Western Digital 320gig SPECIAL EDITION RAID EDITION" drive
[14:53] Beryl: 40gigs for the cheapest crap versus 320gigs for the most advanced you can buy. Any idiot that buys an external drive like that instead of the super-best for the same price is a complete fucktard.