Have any of you bought a Seagate or Toshiba external hdd recently? Have you opened it and took a look inside? I have a recent WD model, which doesn't have the little extra USB adapter anymore, but has a soldered-on USB interface (right on the HDD). I like the separate little adapters, because I can take those off and install the hdd in a laptop. After that, I use the casing for other (older) hdd's. Thanks...
...yep, I perfectly understand why you want a model with a seperate SATA-USB adapter. I have done the same. Replaced couple of harddrives in HP and Acer notebooks - Turned out to be the 'cheaper' solution.
Have a recent Seagate 3TB (like a STBV3000100) and it's a standard sata hdd inside.. but of course the controller board got fried and was smoking within 6 months and is now being RMA'd... so there's that...
No don't know the reason but this product line of drives are all over google for having failing boards.