Mike Elgan at Computerworld has a recent post discussing his experience with external USB drives – he’s lost 6 in the past 10 years. My experience with them is at least as bad, having lost that many in the past five years. None of mine were killed due to physical damage, and in each case the drives weren’t recoverable using software tools. This has happened both with commercial drives and DIY drives where I’ve installed internal drives in external drive enclosures. Lately I’ve had the best luck using NexStar cases and have good luck with them but I’m still paranoid and backup religiously. I still use the drives for backup and convenience but have completely stopped relying on them for primary data storage. What have your experiences been like? Any comments to share?