guessing you never heard of Arabic Numberals, its cool if you look at how they are derived from the number of angles that make up the symbol that stands for the number it represents
From my experience in the datacenter where I work, the failure rate on 2.5" drives has been way higher than 3.5" (granted all of the drives we use are 15k vs the 7200/5400/4200 rpm ones commonly put in laptops). The 2.5" drives we've used fail at a rate of at least 2-3 times higher than our 3.5" ones. On the flip side, we can fit way more of them in a rack and the power requirements are lower so its been worth it to keep using them despite the failure rate
can always pick up an older tape drive - we picked an LTO-2 drive dirt cheap and new tapes were only around $30 each. The tapes can be read by LTO-2/3/4 drives so gives you a little bit of easier time to recover if your drive ever gets hosed
We currently use Seamonkey as the default mail/browser package in the department I work in and don't seem to be moving away from it anytime soon. We've been very happy with it for years
if they were leaking, then it would be easier for the soviets to find them since they could just go looking for traces of radioactivity in the vicinity of the crash site