On Mon, 24 Jul 2006, Andy Smith wrote:

On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 07:46:21PM +0100, Mark Hellman wrote:

quoted

I am in the process of deciding which SATA-II drives should I choose for an
external RAID system. I heard that it was safer to choose drives from
different manufacturers to reduce the chance of near-simultaneous failure
due to model-specific issues.
Is this so?

It's certainly safer.. whether you think it is worth the trouble is
your call.

quoted

And are there other potential problems related with choosing drives from
different manufacturers?

The only issue is the obvious one that the manufacturers are usually
fairly vague about the exact usable size of each disk.  If you
bought half the disks from one manufacturer and half from another
then you should be able to pair them up and use the minimum of the
size of each pair.

Cheers,
Andy

So far the WD 400GB -KD drives and Seagate 400GB seem to have the same 
amount of sectors.