Where did you see that the 840 is still going error-free? It says that the 840 maxed out it's reallocated sectors at around 900TB and veered into a ditch right before the petabyte threshold.
It'd be interesting to run these same tests on enterprise grade drives as well.
Edit: You meant that the 840 Pro is still going, I see.
I think he meant to say "A good reason to encrypt your archives", not just put a password on them. If you encrypt your archive, even a rar, gmail shouldn't be able to see the contents inside of it.
Another solution is to simply change executable names to .exe.backup or something similar, that way it'll register as a ".backup" extension for most systems and not be blocked simply by name (though this wouldn't necessarily defeat things that actually detect and block binary executables).
It'd be interesting to run these same tests on enterprise grade drives as well.
Edit: You meant that the 840 Pro is still going, I see.