They [WD] only offer a 2 year warranty now
Thanks for the update, I didn't realize they'd changed the warranty policy.
I am needing a good external hard drive for my Mac. It will be used primarily for storage. I'm going to try and convert my CDRs (about 2,600) to FLAC. A good portion, but not all, of my discs are HHb CDR 800 master discs of my DAT recordings.
As dnsacks suggests,
now is the time to start thinking about redundancy and backup. I always operate on the assumption that HDDs
will fail without warning. Sometimes they fail with warning and the opportunity to save your data, sometimes with warning and no opportunity to save your data, and sometimes with no warning at all. Since one never knows which might occur, or when, it's best to assume the worst, i.e. the latter. So it's prudent to have redundancies / backups. While you'll still have your CDRs as backups (or even your DATs), both will start to fail at some point. I can say that after transferring all my DATs and ripping all my CDs, I
really didn't want to do it all over again in the event of HDD failure.
A good general rule to follow: you want at least 3 different copies of your data, preferably one of them off-site.
Alternatively to dnsacks' option, I swore off RAID long ago and
use a different solution to ensure I have redundant copies of all my data. If your budget allows, it requires 2 external enclosures and HDDs -- one for primary use, one for redundancy (and really, you should have an off-site backup, too, but that's yet another extension of the discussion). And if your budget doesn't allow...think of all the time and effort spent ripping CDRs and assign some monetary value to your time...the 2nd enclosure and HDD won't seem like such a big deal, then.