One safer than Two??

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Safer? I am not sure what you are asking. Really either one is not safe with out a backup of your important information. By only having one drive and having just the chance of that drive failing would be worse than having two drives and having one fail and you only lose half your information. Either way is a losing situation because you are losing your information. My suggestion would be to get a smaller faster drive for your OS, program files and important information. Then get a larger drive that you can ghost the image of the smaller drive to and use the rest of the space for storage.
 
safer, as in their MTBF value. I have heard that the chances of any one drive failing increases exponentially with the number of drives you own... is it true or not???
 
If you are after that, get a single platter harddrive. Their size is somewhat limited, but since they have only a single platter their chance of failure is lower. In addition they tend to run cooler which should be benefical for their MTBF.
 
As tank_atlantis mentioned, have a good backup plan regardless how you go. Personally, I have two hard drives and I will never go back to just one. Here's my setup:

HDD #1: OS's and programs
HDD #2: Data

I find it easier to reinstall if the OS is on a physically separate drive than your data.
 
okey....so, are the chances of any one harddrive failing increases exponentially with the number of harddrives you own... is it true or not???
 


The failure rate for each individual drive will stay the same; you're just more likely to have a drive fail because you have multiple drives. You can take the failure rate for a single drive and multiply it by the number of drives that you have...
 
The safety is to be found is having a good and regularly tested backup plan. I have six drives, only one of them is for backup. I use 2 x 2-disk RAID 0 arrays. ...and have one drive as a utility/scratch disk. My arrangement is...not safe. Except, that I regularly backup any data that is precious. Were I lazier I could even image the OS, and have and have that backed up as well.

I would not put my trust in the MTBF of any drive. Put the trust in the action you're taking to protect your data...your backups.
 


Let me explain how this would work in a real life scenerio:
If you own 0 hard drives, there is 0 chance of a failure.
If you own 1 hard drive, there is a slim chance of a failure.
If you own 2 hard drives, there are 2 slim chances of a failure.
If you own 3 hard drives, there are 3 slim chances of a failure.
If you own 4 hard drives, there are 4 slim chances of a failure.

Does that help? 😉
 
On the other hand each hard drive's failure rate is pretty much untouched (unless you get overheating caused by cramped conditions and insufficient cooling). So it can be the difference between having one big hard drive and losing everything or having multiple HDs and losing only part of your data. So basically if you have 2 hard drives you're safer by putting seriously important data on both drives since the drives are independent of each other.
 
I don't quite agree, I'd use at least 2 drives and have one backup the other, heck, maybe even use a RAID1 mirror. The chance of both drives failing simultaneously is quite slim...so your chances of being able to retreive ALL of your valuable data in a disaster is higher than if you split up your valuable data between two drives.

So, you've got your My Documents, porn, music, and data (just kidding...no porn) on drive A and those folders are backed up daily to drive B. When disaster strikes you you have your data on at least 1 of the drives.
 
If you're doing critical work with deadlines, etc. RAID 1 is the way to go.

Here's my configuration:
1. Primary drives (2) RAID 1
OS and Programs - no data

2. 500GB drive
data only

3. two 750GB drives USB enclosure
back up of data and a disk image of drive 1.
 
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