I've been thinking about buying an external hard drive but having some vague idea about the current failure rates, I concluded that, for my data storage needs,

I've been thinking about buying an external hard drive but having some vague idea about the current failure rates, I concluded that, for my data storage needs, the new disks will be practically useless for me without RAID-1. The external disk will store my media and backup my local files already, so I don't want to have a backup of a backup. This means I'd have to upgrade the disks of my external RAID-1 unit instead, but my old unit only supports 500GB disks officially. Looks like it's going to be expensive. For reference, I still had some IDE (EIDE?) harddrives manufactured in the 90's that spun up without a glitch a few years ago when I still had an old desktop box with the appropriate controllers. Ditto for some early-90's SCSI drives that I turned on in the early 2000's, they worked just fine. I would trade some speed and silence for a lot more robust platters that I could actually trust.