Ok -- Tom -- this is something you can maybe shed some light on.
How am I to know what Seagate Drives to trust?
First it was 1.5TB drives. Then 1TB drives...then between 2 of my 750GB Seagate's dying, they also said it affected some 750GB drives. So now what do I believe in? These were all Seagate drives that had a 5-yr warrantee.
Color me naive (beige?), but I'd think that 5-yr warranty drives were should be among best in class for reliability -- i.e.l they should be as good (or equiv)...as Business Class.
But obviously something big went through the QA process. Are most of the drives we see NOT business class.
Is the *only* way to ensure good drives to go SAS? I thought businesses were going for SATA for density -- but as someone who's had 3 Seagate drives (1T, 2x750GB) drives go bad in the past 2 months, I'm more than a little disenchanted with the brand.
I tried a WD 1TB, 'Green' drive, but the 1 and only I tried was DOA -- so I went back with Seagate, which used to have a sterling reputation. But now? What drives are best for reliability? -- What drives can I buy and 'forget about them' until its time for a technology refresh?
Second question -- maybe some drive manufacturers already do this -- but I was wondering -- is it possible for a multi-plate drive to act like a Raid-0 or RAID-1? I.e. read/write to multiple heads on different but aligned platters to achieve faster speeds? I.e. if you have 4 platters, you'd interleave read/writes from each of the 4 platters to achieve 4x read or write speeds?
A*a