Better hard disk

"yes - kind of. they are called raid-1 with hot-spare setups with:

monitoring of raid state and working alerting system
surface scan scheduled every couple days

remember that super-hard disk will not protect you against fire / robery etc. so just back up...

i had failed wd raptors [ which are quite decent disks by the way ] after few weeks of use, i had failed 15k rpm sas server drives, i have still working 6GB ide drives."

"Western digital makes at least 3 grades of hard drives:

Black (5 yr warranty)
Blue (3 yr)
Green (3 yr)

You can tell by the warranty information how long they expect the HDD to survive.

This may be the same with other manufacturers, but I haven't looked into it"