Harry Mangalam wrote:

Then problems with the disks - the JD series are particularly ill suited to 
RAID5 apparently because of the BIOS algorithms and WD will replace them for 
more expensive SD series disks without complaint but the replacement web form 
is quite confusing and this delayed things even longer (they replaced only 
SOME of the disks with SD and some of them with more JDs).  This was 
admittedly my fault, but the WD support person had a similarly difficult time 
with the form.  

The SD's are 100% duty cycle, 24x7, 1M hour MTBF commercial SATA II drives, 
whereas the JD's are SATA I with a "desktop" rating and a 'designed for 
Microsoft Windows' cert.  Why WD would trade a commercial drive for a 
desktop drive?

Besides that I've used 3Ware controllers since the 6400 and have had zero 
problems with anything.  The gui tool is nice but not suited to production use.

t.