For the past 3 years we've been purchasing all our external FW drives and single-drive enclosures from OWC (http://www.macsales.com) and have had phenominal performance and reliability. Not one bad drive/enclosure and superb customer support, not to mention their prices on bare drives even enterprise-class drives is the best around.

At issue with some of the external enclosures isn't the drives they select to put inside but more the controller/backplane of the enclosure, many of which have been getting their parts from China and of course QC on most China-made items has fallen through the floor.

OWC, DVServe, Sonnet and a few others only purchase components from first-tier suppliers of which none of the China-based outlets are.