Let's face it, nearly everyone has had a mechanical hard drive fail at one time or another...the idea of using these for anything other than a short duration, and by that I mean 3-5 years (and even that is probably pushing it) doesn't sound practical by and large, yet it is still far and away THE motus operandi for backup and media streaming.....will that spiffy new 1 TB USB drive still be clicking and ticking even 5 years from now? 10? We're relying on a mechanical device with an armature that is CONSTANTLY moving to access bits and bytes, when your backing up or playing media...it's almost it's destiny to fail! It's literally a coin flip that you have no control over as to whether a hard disc drive is going to fail or not. How funny that analog vinyl recordings will far outlast digital storage to a mechanical device...even the new solid state drives are suseptible to eventual erasure over time, or possible erasure from being magnetized...all this technology, yet the ubiquitous hard disc drive is more fragile and likely to break down than technologies that have long since come and gone...Guess I'll be needing a backup to the backup to the backup to the backup :D

One word..... RAID

Today's hardware is made to break just for you to buy more!

Some companys spends millions studying the materials for them to break shortly after the warranty period! Clever aren't them? ;)

3-5 years from now we will be copying our files from 1tb drives to shiny new 10tb (or whatever is the latest) drives.

i have been using/building pcs for 25-30 years. back in the late 80s i worked for a company that sold high performance 1gb drives to mac users for $13,000 for storing graphics. all those drives are probably in a landfill someplace now.

in another 5-10 years it will be just as easy to backup 25gb hd media files as it was to backup text files in 1985.