I don't know if I would classify a manufacturer's entire output as unworthy: if they have problems with one range, they hopefully learn from that in the next generation. Seagate famously had
major firmware problems in 2008, while IBM got
sued over mass disk failures in 2001.
If you're really concerned about what disk goes inside the external enclosure, you can roll your own: get an enclosure and HDD from someone like
Scan, and put it together. If I was doing this today I'd probably prefer a Samsung 1TB drive for about £75. No, I don't think that's too much - it's amazing how we're already taking Terabytes for granted, isn't it?
