Another thought:
Fanless drives do not necessarily mean a loss of data:
The last external drive I bought (about 18 months ago) was a 6 TB FW8/USB (2 drives) set to run in in RAID-1 mirror mode of 3 TB capacity so if one drive fails, it can be replaced without any loss of data. This one was a WD My Book II. It's supposedly easy to change the drives or so I read. The drive's software keeps you aware of if the drives are working properly. The entire back & top of the casing has air slots. Note that Win XP does not support drives larger than 2 TB, but they had a 4 TB model equivalent.
I only use mine for backup & longest connected time about 10 hours, no issue with heating.

I'm not up to date on the latest media setups & storage devices. I don't even have a digital TV yet lol (our city only stopped transmiting analogue as an alternative March last year.) I use a digital set-top box, which does have ability for playing media via a USB HDD (ie: apparently has built-in audio & video codecs.) I haven't tested that option out yet (I rarely watch TV these days.)

Hi LOTR

Replying to your thought:OK, I will agree with that but it does mean that drive will run hot, regardless of what the manufacturers say, and are more prone to failure.

As for air slots, I believe they just barely make it as cosmetic adornments, that's why I have to keep a small desk fan blowing across the top of my modem-router. It just means that any further external HDs I get must have a sizeable fan installed.

However, I must admit I am somewhat apprehensive about going down the whole external USB HD drives again, plus the device I am looking at seems somewhat flimsy.

And I guess that no matter how much disk space I purchase I will always find stuff to fill them with. Back in the day when a 40MB HD was considered to be "very big" I had to delete stuff from my HDs to keep them running. Now, I seem to keep everything, I should probably re-learn the art of editing and deleting stuff.


UK

PS. Archiving is just another form of keeping old stuff.

PPS. There is a way around WinXP's 2TB limit but only for internal drives.