Charles,
I've always had good luck with Maxtor products. I haven't had any recent
experience with their external drives, but have used an older one with
great success. Belkin is really penetrating the PC market lately. Some of
their other stuff seems solid enough so I'm guessing their USB 2.0 cards
are good too. I've only used Adaptec cards so I can't comment from
experience on the Belkin.
As to the power line networking, if sharing the Internet and printing is
your goal, then go for it. It works most of the time with the exception
being when there is too much noise on the power lines. You won't know it
until you hook it up. If you plan on moving lots of data around on a
regular basis, hardwire at 100 mbps is still the way to go.
Michael
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