I've been buying and replacing drives for most of my life and I can say that there isn't a brand who is going to be superior until you get into enterprise class drives. The one thing you should look at is the replacement policy. At one point when I was buying a good deal of drives in bulk I ran into a bad batch from Maxtor. The thing that kept me buying from them was that I got replacements the next day via FedEx along with a mailer to return the defective drive in t he next 30 days. Not sure if they are still doing that as it was about 7 years back. I can't give any particular reason I have for the brand I chose other than warrenty and general trends in platter density and drive offerings. That said, I have never liked Western Digital. Likely there is no real data, but they just feel inferior to me. I liked Quantum until just before Maxtor bought them. Maxtor was good for a while, but then I switched to Hitachi or Seagate depending on the model. Lately I've been using Seagate. Can't comment onthe 1.5 TB for booting as I don't use large drives for the OS, too expensive to mirror; use mine for fraps file storage.

In all this time I have never seen a real head crash. Most drives die due to heat, bearing failure, or electrical component MTBF. I look at hard drives like socks, eventually you should replace them and a little while later they will have holes too big to ignore.

As for buying drives in the same lot for a RAID, if you are hitting the MTBF average for the drives then you have had them in the raid too long and should have had backups Or a service contract; always love when the guys from EMC or other drive companies show up within 30 minutes of a failure. For most home users you aren't going to see a difference IMHO.

- Souca -