I agree with this suggestion. If you're concerned about losing a drive on a long trip or something - I would keep the 2nd drive somewhere safe, maybe keep it in one of those little pouches with a tool kit - kind of like a disaster recovery kit. If the primary drive pops, then bust out the disaster recovery kit and simply swap the drives. Keeping the 2nd drive installed in the player is probably an even better idea.

I've never really thought about this until you mentioned the RAID question. But - in my line of work I am exposed to just about any computer hardware and parts you might imagine. Its been my experience that laptop drives are FAR more reliable than their desktop counterparts. The number one reason we get broken laptops returned from users are bad batteries, bad displays, spills, droppage, the laptops themselves are actually quite reliable, more reliable than their clumbsy users. In these cases, we simply exchange the laptop hard drive into a good, spare, and send the user on their way. However, the number one reason user desktop machines is hard drive failure. Just thought I'd put that out there.

Any other users here ever have their empeg drive crash?