Shurely if it was worth speculating about the manufacturer of the drive then it would be pretty easy to open up the case and tell the readers something about the disk within? If you did that and there were no markings then at least report this to the hw/curious amongst your readers!

I don't know anybody who would want to pay 160 dollars for 1 TB when they can get that same TB (albeit a little slower) for 100 dollars (or less!) elsewhere. It looks nice, but that's not enough.

Where does it say that El Reg have one in their office to test?

But it might be a Quantum drive so that when you open the box, all you find inside is a dead cat!

Its first external 3.5" drive? Then why have I been seeing rectangular aluminium boxes with "Toshiba" on them, an USB connector on the back and presumably a hard disk inside, of capacities surpassing even the most recent 2.5" drives, for the past two or three years already? Is this because I'm in Europe, and it's the US where they only now introduced them in the 3.5" form factor?

@Sampler: not like it's rocket science to fit a drive in an external caddy.

Yes it is....you havent met my parents....

@thomas k.

No, there is no chance of it being alive....it is from the land of Sweet and Sour Ca....Chicken

Yeah! I've got one. And it's pretty good. That is it does what it should. So far. Ain't that fantastic?

As others have said, Toshiba have been selling such drives in the UK for several years now.

I bought my first two from PC World maybe three years ago when getting an external 250Gb drive for under £100 was cheaper than buying a 250Gb uncased drive from my local cheap parts supplier. Since then I've bought a few more on ebay, originally to get a spare power supply (as one had failed) but the "dead" drive I bought turned out to have a simple physical connector problem so I repaired that and bought another, repaired that too, and now have five that I rotate as my backup drives (when you can buy an external drive 500Gb for £30 it makes a fine backup drive)

One ebay purchase did arrive with a *dead* drive in it, but as has been said, dropping in another disk is simple. And the aluminium cases are excellent for head dissipation so very quiet in use (only the drive spinning and head clicking noises) ... and aside from that one power supply issue, I've never had a problem with either the case electronics or the drives within.

Early ones were PATA, more recent ones have been SATA. (And the PC World ones used a round four pin connector, while the ones from ebay have all used a standard barrel connector)

But they have all been USB2.0 *only* so this new drive may be the first with the eSATA connector.

There's a 50% chance you're joking (decreasing to 0% if you're American); if not, there's a 100% chance you don't understand probability calculations.

IIRC it's both 100% alive and 100% dead until you open the case. Of course I could be anywhere up to 100% wrong on that...

.... because I could have sworn blind I have a Tosh USB external 3.5 drive that Ebuyer had on offer about 9 months ago.