Comment Re:eSATA or Multilane SAS (Score 1) 210
I forgot to mention why I chose the more expensive WD RE2 drives instead of normal retail drives.
The firmware on most drives is designed to make multiple attempts when it fails to read data off the disk on the first try. Sometimes taking 20-30seconds before telling the OS about the read failure. In a traditional RAID setup (or RAIDZ w/ ZFS) you would prefer to have the disk report the read error immediately and let the RAID card/OS handle recalculating the data using the redundant copies. RE2/RE3 drives play nicely like this, most retail drives just try a dozen times...and while that happens, Linux/Solaris/whatever may think the drive is dead since it's not responding and report it as a failed, degrading the array.
Also, the RE2 drives have a 5yr warranty and are supposedly designed for the vibration of multidrive setups.