I've been looking for a 500 GB external hard drive for some time now, but every one of them has complaints from users that they burn out.

They may work great in the beginning, but a few weeks/months down the road and they fry.

What makes this one any different?

I've seen posts saying the best bet is to separately buy an internal hard drive and an external case with fan and then to just put the internal drive into the case yourself.

I'm a novice when it comes to hardware, so I don't know - is putting an internal drive into an external case yourself a simple plug in type of thing or is it more complex?

Any help is appreciated!

Most cheapo external drives without a fan use the case as a heat sink. The drives are mounted without the use of thermal grease which would help the thermal transfer efficiency. I use my external drives on a demand basis, that is when I am done transferring data I turn the drive off. I have a mix of home made, Maxtor, Seagate, I/O Magic external drives that are from 1 to 3 years old and have not had any failures. I have, however, had hard drives that are permanantly installed fail, and that was at the 5 year mark. It is advisable to run a SMART drive monitoring program that reports drive condition, so that you might be able rescue data from a drive that is showing signs of sickness

If anyone is wondering what brand of harddrive sits inside the case its a Hitachi, long story short, Verbatim is owned by Mitsubishi Chemical Corp. which has a partnership with Hitachi for selling harddrives, the harddrive has a mitsubishi or verbatim label on it, but the hardware itself is made by Hitachi

If the HDD is a Hitachi (Which is quite good) then why when i open the enclosure and remove the drive does it say "Western Digital" (which is much better) on the label?
The drive that i found in my enclosure is a Western Digital Caviar 500GB HDD. Why they called it Caviar i'm not sure but I have several Western Digital HDD's and none have given me problems. One of them is a 5 year old 80GB IDE HDD and they run like dreams. There is one question though. Why when i put the 500GB in the pc my HDD monitoring apps pick up its temperature but, when i put it in an enclosure the apps dont? Does the S.M.A.R.T work externally or only internally

The drive inside the "review drive" was a Western Digital.
Also i think S.M.A.R.T only works on the native drive interface (in this case SATA) and the drive is connected via USB.