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Arrggh! I hate getting suckered into searching for discounted flights. The damned Virgin Atlantic deal doesn't show up for me. The cheapest DC to Lodon flights I can find are $457 per person. And every time I try to change the parameters, it's just another slog through their database.
I wish they would point out the days they say these are available.
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http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/specialoffers/usspecialoffers.jsp
Washington DC $219*$289**
Feb 06, 2010 - Mar 28, 2010
Mar 29, 2010 - May 23, 2010
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I bought the 1.5 TB Seagate Free Agent Hard Drive at Costco for $109 in December, but ended up returning it after reading the reviews at Amazon and Newegg. In the short term it is a good hard drive, but apparently it has a lot of problems not dying. It carries a 5 year warranty, but how useful is that when it breaks and you lose all your backed-up data? I ended up going with a WD 1.5TB I got at the dreaded Best Buy instead and it's worked out great thus far.
If you lose the backup data, then you make a new backup after it's replaced. The point of backing up is to have multiple locations for the data, not to just shift it to a new drive.
If you want bulk storage with backup, you want a RAID 1 or RAID 5 array. Internal, peripheral, or NAS, doesn't really matter. With that, if one drive fails, you're still good. My internal array actually is telling me that one drive has failed (at least I think, it's being weird). If it had been 2 drives, I'd have lost a bunch of data. All I need to do is go get a new drive and slap it in. Many RAID setups are even hot-swappable, meaning no downtime, just some slowdown while it rebuilds.
The thing I always remember is how often I leave a good review when I am happy with something. You also need to read all the reviews of a product. I can't tell you how often I find reviews dinging a product but they begin with \"I was happy with XXXXXX, but it took 3 weeks to get here...\" or something similar. They give a bad rating to the product when they have a problem with the USPS or the company itself. I say that after not reading anything about this drive, mind you. I owned a WD drive that was the epitome of horrible drives, and it turned out to be the enclosure, not the drive itself. I cured the problem by taking the WD drive out of the \"my book\" enclosure, and putting it in a $14 one I found on a Morning Deal. I bought a seagate drive on Black Friday, and knock on wood, haven't had a problem.