I have been fairly lucky over the years, in terms of drive failures. The most recent was just over a month ago, with a Seagate in my Mac Mini; I'm assuming that was a heat-related failure since things are packed pretty tightly in there. The time before that, it was another Seagate almost 10 years ago. I agree that Quantum and Maxtor were both good brands, but unfortunately they're both part of Seagate now. I have some Quantum drives that are over 20 years old and still kicking.
I don't do any RAID currently; my important files are backed up across three different computers using Live Sync, and also on an external 1TB drive using Time Machine on the Mini. That, and the occasional optical backup (usually every three months--much less frequent than I used to do) and I think I'm pretty much covered. The only down-time I experienced with the recent drive failure was waiting for the replacement to arrive and installing software. Of course, this happened between the time the external was ordered, and when it showed up--if I'd already had the external in place, restoration would have taken a couple of clicks.
While RAID is great for enterprise servers where downtime costs big $$$, I don't see it as necessary for the average user. Of course, my perspective may be a little different since I have multiple computers and having one go down doesn't bring everything to a halt.
