One caveat: whilst running a slightly older firmware release on my 120GB Vertex drive, earlier this summer some kind of bug hit hard, and wiped the drive.

No problem, I just restored from the previous night's backup, after first upgrading it to the latest firmware (two revisions newer than what crashed).

Stuff can happen. That's the first catastrophic failure I've ever had from any drive. In theory, that bug got fixed in the newer firmware. In practice, one never knows.

Do note that I'm still using the (upgraded) drive as my main "everything" drive again now, despite having a choice of others.

Cheers