[HarryC]

Well I guess the measurement of being a pro is not using WD drives the real experts depend on single user reports on Egghead etc., They blacks must be bad as they come with a 5yr warranty Do the others? We go thru hundreds of hard drives of all models so I'v seen failure rates in the real world Some Seagates, some Maxtors have high failure rates as well as some models of WD, IBMs were good and still seem to be after Hitachi took over. We have upgraded three Snap550s now with the black drives and have installed 12 more in HP XW8400's in raid 5 all with no DOAs. The Snap550s are undergoing stress testing, being driven by 4 DL380 G5s VMware about 80 virtual machines (Server 2008r2,2008,2003 and 2003r2. The 550s run iscsi and are hosting some machines and are the target for VCenter backups, quite a load and zero problems. I admit there are many faster solutions but none as cost effective. I'll report back after a few weeks of testing and productions with the extended results. I realize Im a newbie as I have only been in the business since 1965 and ran several hardware level 3 support centers for IBM before I retired