[HarryC]

I would agree that enterprise class drives are preferable on most occasions but if you look at the caviar black vs re version the only real difference is in the time a read error is retried the re is 7 seconds vs 15 seconds on the standard version. Warranties on both drives are 5 years. I have numerous caviar black drives rinning in Promise arrays for the last year with zero failures. I can't say the same for HP u320 SCSI drives in some other arrays. It's been my experience that a drive taking 15 seconds to recover a read error would be thrown offline by the raid controller and you get a degraded warning on the array. Never had one with the caviar blacks so...... The price/performance is right if you need a lot of storage. You definitely want to stay away from the "green" versions of the drives for arrays.