Since I find myself traveling with many hours of downtime, I've taken to packing some long form projects along on 2.5 inch drives.
I'm interested in any experiences regarding how well these smaller drives stand up to use as render drives. My projects are often up to 2 hours in length.
Stay away from the 250GB drives currently (and to be on the safe side even the 200GB drives). The 160GB drives are very reliable, at least if you choose the best brands.
Hitachi hasn't impressed me in spite of their 5-year warranty. I've gone with Seagate Momentus 5400.3 as my first choice in 2.5" currently (I use them with my MacBook Pro, in an external enclosure).
I carry 2.5" drives back and forth every day, sometimes on a bicycle. They've held up fine and I've run out of space long before I could break them. But I don't work off them all that much, just daily backups and transfers.