James Wiebe, of WiebeTech, has written a terrific white paper that exhaustively analyzes the reliability of external enclosures, detailing the factors that contribute to failures.
As we’ve known for some time here at Shirt Pocket, large capacity external drives that use multiple physical drives in a single enclosure to boost their performance and capacity are much less reliable than single drive units.
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who relies upon hard drives for storage, backup or otherwise, should read and understand this paper.
Thanks for writing it, James!