After the failures of Seagate Firewire drives, I won't use them ever again.
My Goodness people.
Every. Drive. Fails.
Often.
The only way you can safely guard against it is to, at minimum, maintain a time offset backup (not raid1) on different types of drives, preferably with either different enclosures, or int/ext pairs.
More realistically, it would be much better to do the following:
Working Data Set on RAID1/5/10 depending on capacity/speed needs.
Backup Data Set on RAID1/5/6 depending on capacity needs (different manufacturers drives, or at least different batch lots)
Offline Backup Data Set on LTO3/4/5 depending on capacity needs.
Just make sure to have your LTO drive serviced every year or so and your golden.
None of it is extremely expensive, especially if you look around on eBay.
You'll get good speed on your working drives, with some inherent redundancy. You'll get decent backup speeds and some redudancy their, and when you finish with a project, dump it all out to LTO which has both an excellent shelf life, and a great $/GB ratio.
This whole conversation of "this failed me once, I won't use it again" Is silly to begin with, doubly so when discussing storage mediums.
It's not surprise that they fail, and often at that.
Plan accordingly.
Karl P