After all the fuzz about the failing Seagate drives, I am currently revising my backup strategy to elevate to paranoia level 2

Currently, I am syncronizing all my (valuable) data between my PC and notebook using an external drive every day, so I have at least 3 copies of all (at most 1 day old) data at any time. In addition, I make a full backup on a dedicated (WD MyBook) archive drive every month or so to cover for user errors such as accidentally deleting files across all disks.

I am currently looking into moving my archive drive to 2.5" drives and add anothe layer of redundancy via RAID1. (Found this nice little enclosure: http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sata_enclosures/1822uesr.asp).

Question to you guys from a reliability/data recovery perspective:

Is there any relevant difference between today's notebook drives (looking at a couple of WD5000BEVT 500GB's0) and desktop drives in terms of long term reliability, MTBF, and data stability (I am looking at a couple of WD5000BEVT 500GB's0)?

Thanks for your advice !

This case is definitely outstanding. Its from Sunnytek and has a built in fan.

The only drawback for external devices is that they will stay turned on and
become extremely hot. The fan is the solution to overcome this, but it depends
on the quality of the fan ....

I will get mine in two to three weeks and will definitely use it with 2x 500GB
2,5" Samsung drives. I found them to be the coolest (in terms of temperature)
drives.

In the case I use now (without a fan) they are toasting each other over 50°
Celsius. -- But only for about 20 minutes - I organised the daily backup with a
timer - not to have the USB drive running the whole day.

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