HDD drives faults: how frequent are them?

[fedcas]

Hello,
I don't know if it's the appropriate section but it's the only generic one about hdd players.

I'm going to buy a nikon D50 and I'm also considering buying a hdd player in the future, because of d50's greater images than my actual compact camera ones. But probably I'm interested more in the data security than in the amount of data stored (losing my photos in my Holland trip had been terrible) so I'm worried about wich could be the most secure way of storing them. I know that failures are uquite frequents in SD cards (and unfortunately, as i've said, i've had first person experience about that) but I don't know how much are portable hdd drives might be reliable.

So I'm asking to you experts, are portable players' hdd drives faults frequent or they are very low proabability events?

Thanks

[DD]

The are just like any other drive; they can fail randomly for no reason at any random time. Really however, they are only likely to fail if they are damaged through ways of mistreatment (drops, bumps, etc). If you trust your data on a computer drive (and you trust yourself to look after the player), your data should be perfectly safe, and if anything does go wrong, that's life. However if you are worried about loosing data, it might be worth looking into storage methods such as burning the images onto CD or DVD (and then making sure you look after them ).