[blue68f100]

If you shop online for HD's, you need to know if your buying OEM or retail. OEM drives only have a 1 yr warranty. If the online seller is not a licensed reseller for the MFG, the 1 yr may not apply, so NO Warranty.

Example: If a company went out of bussiness and a company bought there stock, that had cases of drives where the mfg date is over 1 yr old. You will not have any warranty.

If your buying retail, make sure you get a recipt, may need it for the warranty. Without it the mfg goes by mfg date on the drive. WD interprise drives comes with a 5 yr warranty, even though the the drive is packaged like OEM.

I was able to get WD 2500SE 250gig RE drives for around $70/drive. So the difference at the time was ~$10/drive. Money well spent.

There is a siginificant weight (heavier) difference between enterprise drives and retail. So yes their is a significant difference between drives. There is a performace difference too. As andy said. With the difference being the RE drives have a min seek time. Meaning that they must respond within a set time. All other drives do not have this requirement. Meaning that they will not be in sync with the other drives in the raid. Causing slower responce and data flow.

The bottom line is if you want speed and longlife buy interprise drives.