Every single hard disk in existence will eventually die. How soon? Who knows. The MTBF rating is useful for this, but it's a pretty twisted statistic and is thus nearly meaningless.

For Apple users . . . there seems to be issues with overheating of the Time Capsule units as well. One of the sore points with many Apple designed products is that the laws of thermodynamics doesn't always recognize "cool design."

I would get multiple smaller drives, ie 2 or 3 1TB drives rather than 1 4tb.
A bit more expensive, but as stated earlier, it WILL fail.
Figure out how to have 2 or 3 and rotate through them.

Take the next one, figure out how to copy anything new or changed to it from the current one and then put the current one in a safe place (a safe works well).

That way when it / one does fail you have most of your data.

I agree with having plenty of backups, I keep at least three copies of everything critical (including a cloud backup).

This drive is just for movies and TV shows that I stream to my TV. I still have hard copies of everything that I've ripped from DVDs; some media that I've bought online will need a separate backup. All this media can be replaced. I will probably end up getting a RAID 0, 4TB drive (2 x 2TB) in a single case for fast access. I have plenty of other 500MB and 1TB drives kicking around for backups.

Obviously true. My 250gb HD from 2004 is still going rather strong on my desk. I'd say that's pretty good :o

I got an enclosure, with a fan, that's got enough power to support 1TB of data, and a 750gb seegate HD, for a total of around $80 shipped.
I think that's a pretty decent deal.

I'll see what's up when I get everything tho. Thanks for the advise everyone.
~Nate

That sounds like a great deal. Good luck with it.