[jontz]

Good thoughts about the start up power surge. The 500GB Seagates do have four platters to get moving, the Hitachi's have five. That is a fair amount of mass to get moving. I wonder if adding some relatively large value capacitors to the output of the power supply could help? I don't have a 4000, so I take it that it attempts to start up all four drives at once? My 4100 starts up drive one, then drive two, etc, to avoid the power supply shutdown problem that you are having with your 4000. The irony here is that the 4100 can't handle large drives because of the LBA48 bit issue!

I have had my 4100 up and going with a single WD 1600JB 160 GB drive, recognized as 137GB, formatted to 128GB. I was planning on getting three more of these drives and just letting the rest of the space be wasted, because I would still be getting 17GB more per drive vs using 120's. Simple economics made my decision though when I get a screaming deal on four brand new Seagate 120GBs. I am running a 4 disk RAID 5 array with no problems.