Seagate and Hitachi are my “go to” brands, from 300 GB to 1TB, but my connections are either firewire or internal eSATA. I do have a couple of boxes for my JBODs (just a bunch of drives) with Seagate & Maxtor drives and USB connections. I used these for storage but not to edit from or to. I’ve used Western Digital. All the units I’ve used with the exception of two (an old 4GB and 9GB IBM) have served me well with huge gaps in mean time between failures and bad blocks.
Somehow, I guess the mention of USB drive, I got the impression we were discussing solid state drives. Sorry, my bad. IMHO even cheap drives (USB or other connections) are fine for general archive work, but I simply would not edit with a USB drive of any size, shape or description, internal or external. USB 3 or Firewire 800, even 400 …
