You don't have to tell me twice. Or even once for that matter.

I know the feeling. Any time I've had a tech blame it on my router, I kindly point out that my router is successfully routing traffic between every other interface... And yet they still insist on walking me through basic troubleshooting steps. Eventually, I just flat out ask them to try reprovisioning the line instead of doubting the functionality of the devices on my end. 99% of the time that works.

Indeed. Me and my friends' corner of the action at Quake Con smelled more like Dr. Pepper and twizzlers than it did sweat.

Its not a matter of bad controller design, its a matter of expected behavior. The problem is that the consumer drive doesn't necessarily immediately acknowledge there's a problem. And the controller has no idea there's a problem because the disk didn't immediately acknowledge the error, so it doesn't attempt to pull the data from the other volumes until the timeout is reached. And as far as the controller is concerned, the disk is taking longer than normal to respond to a command, and thus is likely failing. You can adjust the amount of time it waits for a response to account for consumer disks, But this degrades performance because the controller is just waiting on data that it could have gotten from a faster source. Essentially it boils down to: Enterprise drives expect to have a fallback, and thus they will immediately report an error. Consumer drives, on the other hand, expect to not have anything to fall back on or any time limits on how long they have to respond, so they won't say there's anything wrong until they've tried to fix it. Hypothetically, since this is primarily a matter of error reporting we're discussing, the entire problem could be solved by simply flashing raid optimised firmware onto a consumer drive. This wouldn't magically turn them into enterprise drives, but it would solve the potential problem with using them in raid.

Everyone seems to be missing the fact that most of these enterprise drives are little 2.5 inch 15k rpm speed daemons. And as for your comment about consumer drives in raid. While it might work most of the time, the firmware that comes on the disk's controller isn't necissarily optimised for a raid environment. Minor errors pop up during everyday operations, and a normal single drive will spend some time calculating to recover from the error. This is perfect for a single drive scenerio, but If this happens in a raid environment, the controller times out and assumes the disk has gone offline. Even if the disk hasn't actually failed, This puts the volume in degraded mode until you can bring that disk back online. Disks optimized for a raid enviornment just mark the sector as bad, tell the controller, and let the other volumes pick up the slack for that piece of data-- no harm, no foul. Sure you can adjust the timeout on the raid controller, but why wait for the single disk to do its business when the raid card can just direct the task to the other disks. Minor details such as that make for a world of difference.