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OK, so you got a laptop. Great! But…don’t you think that 80-160-320GB hard drive is too small? I mean, come on – let’s get serious! In a short mountain trip, I usually end up with at least 10GB of video and pictures…so even a 320GB hard drive can become small fast. Too fast, really! So…what’s the best external hard drive, after all?

The question above is pretty interesting, and while we’ll talk about the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 RAID box (the beauty pictured above) a bit later, now I’ll start by offering you a low-cost solution for your external storage needs. You can even donate some cash to the nearest church, and still get out of it better than some of your friends, for the same storage capacity!
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So, I was looking to get a new internal drive, as I always hated having more than a drive inside my computer, for various reasons. Once I got a new 1TB Enterprise Edition drive from Samsung(5 year warranty, 32MB buffer, 7200rpm, a really silent and pretty fast beast), I found myself with the “old” 320GB drive on my hands, a Seagate with about 4 years warranty left. Sell it? Why sell it, when I found some external rack for only $20?

That’s the advice – get a decent external rack case, and then a standalone hard drive. This way, you may even get out of it cheaper than a similar external hard drive(if you’re going for a cheap rack, as I did – I didn’t have any other alternative, anyway), more warranty for the hard drive inside the case, and – most of all – you’ll have the ability to upgrade it easily when needed(the hard drive inside the case, not the whole mumbo-jumbo, of course).

Price? About $20-$80 for the rack, plus the price of the drive you’ll use inside it.

On the other hand, I spotted some Seagate external drives for a good price, and offering 5 years warranty, so if you want to forget about the ability to upgrade the hard drive inside the case, you can also take this solution into account.

Now, here’s the best external hard drive I have seen so far, at least today – since it’s a new product, we can’t talk about reliability, but the specs are looking great! The quad-interface Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 RAID box is simply a beast, sporting FireWire 400, FireWire 800, eSATA and USB 2.0 sockets, as well as the following selectable RAID settings – 0, 1, 5, 10 or Span (NRAID).

The OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 is now available in no less than 7 configurations, as you can see below:

- 2TB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro QҲ (500GB x 4 w/64MB cache) & 3 year warranty – $679.99
- 3TB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Q×2 (750GB x 4 w/128MB cache) & 3 year warranty – $849.99
- 4TB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Q×2 (1TB x 4 w/128MB cache) & 3 year warranty – $979.99
- 6TB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 (1.5TB x 4 w/128MB cache) & 3 year warranty – $1149.99
- 8TB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 (2TB x 4 w/128MB cache) & 3 year warranty – $1899.99
- Enterprise Class 2TB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 (500GB x 4 w/64MB cache) & 5 year warranty – $799.99
- Enterprise Class 4TB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Q×2 (1TB x 4 w/128MB cache) & 5 year warranty – $1149.99

These being said, you can also consider grabbing one Other World Computing Mercury Elite external drive from the list above, as long as you don’t want to carry it around – but what’s the best external hard drive…well, that depends a lot on your needs and budget.

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