Oh dear. It looks like my trusty 80Gb Freecom FHD-2 Pro hard drive has bitten the dust, a day after I finally finished installing a VPC of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 upon it (coincidence? I suspect not!). Now when I plug in the USB cable, the drive howls like a scalded kitty. Not good.

Apart from VPCs, I generally use my portable HD for convenience of transferring files between work, laptop and desktop, and for holding a selection of the most useful software installations and MSDN ISOs. There’s little on there that isn’t also on one of my PCs, save a few eBooks perhaps, so I haven’t actually lost too much data, thankfully.

I suppose I should think about buying a replacement. As you might expect, storage space has increased somewhat in the three years since I bought the FHD-2 Pro, it seems that 250Gb is the sweet spot for portable drives. Question is, do I go for the surprising cheap and cute Western Digital MyBook Passport, or pay slightly more for the Freecom ToughDrive..?