Good durable portable external USB drive?

[sdsumike619]

I just had a Western Digital WD1200B006 external firewire/usb drive fail last night. Fortunately, it was not the hard drive itself, but either the power or the controller card inside. I was able to take the drive out and connect it internally and all was well. Whenever I leave the house, I like to disconnect the drive and hide it in the event of a burglary.

What is a good portable drive, i.e. one that won't self destruct from being turned off and unplugged a lot? This particular drive didn't have an on/off button so maybe that had something to do with its eventual failure, not sure..

[Soopafresh]

I put mine together out of components so I can choose the drives. While I've had one drive failure (out of 16 cases), the chassis has never failed.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182144&cm_re=rosewill_enclosu...-144-_-Product

[sdsumike619]

Did some research and learned that the "portable" drives actually don't even use power supplies. So that's probably the way to go. I'm not using that machine for any video capturing, just regular business stuff so the 5400RPM shouldn't be an issue.

[Soopafresh]

There you go...