1TB hard drive

I just ordered my new iMac. 24", 2.8ghz, 4gb Ram and the 1TB hard drive. It comes Friday. Can't wait. My question: Should I have opted for a smaller hard drive? I read a post earlier which got me thinking. It refereed to larger hard drives having a greater chance at mechanical failure. Is this true? Granted there's not much I can do about it now. I just want to know what I'm in for. At least I have the 3 year Apple Care Plan if or when things start to head south.

the one tb hard drive is actually 2 500gb hard drives.. so i think of it as actually being safer because you have 2 places to save your data.

Well according to the apple website it says this about the 24 inch imac:

"Optional 500GB, 750GB, or 1TB Serial ATA 7200-rpm hard drive"

So I'm thinking the 1 TB HD is 1 drive. Not 2 as you said. But I'm just going off the site as I don't own one of these. You might know better than me.

Its surely going to be just 1 drive. The enclosure is so slim. If there was space for another drive, what are they doing with it when you get an iMac with just 1 drive? Though it would have been cool if they had an option for another drive so that one could use Time Machine without an external drive...

As crazy as it seems, I am now seeing single 1 TB drives out there each weekend, advertized in the local Best Buy and CompUSA. So we definitely have 1 TB drives these days.

Greater chance of mechanical failure? Not sure about that. They are bleeding edge, so they have not proven their reliability yet. That could be at the heart of the statement.

The other thing to consider is the reliability per bit. Someone may have made the mistake of saying that having your data on 2 500 GB disks halves the likelihood of a disk failure impacting any particular data item you have. I don't buy that though. Assuming each drive has the same MTBF, the likelihood of failure on either one is the same, so unless you RAID the data, the likelihood of a disk failure affecting any given piece of data is the same no matter how many disk drives you store your data on.

mathogre might be able to shed some light here. mathogre, does the above make sense, or is my fading memory of university statistics in the wrong these days?

Lets just remember this, all things mechanical will break down eventually. Just enjoy what you have. Try to backup when you can and if disaster strikes you have some backup of some kind.

On another note I have 4 250 GB's in my Mac Pro in a raid to see 1 TB. It has been working great since Feb. I try to back up once a month on some DVD's.

Time machine...When will thy come to thee?!