Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB

bonez wrote:
Well, I bit the bullet and upgraded all 4 drives to SD1A from SD18. So far, pretty good though I just noticed that drive 4 got 1 reallocated sector. Otherwise, things still doing ok.... so far.

I did the same last night. I put in the 4th 1.5 TB drive and let it go. However, I remembered that after the fourth disk is initialized and the volume is resynchronized, you need to do a reboot to trigger the volume expansion. See here:
http://kbserver.netgear.com/kb_web_files/N101697.asp

So, right now I have a 4x 750 GB volume on 4x 1.5TB drives. As long as I don't reboot, I can keep it that way for a bit of testing. I should be able to swap back in a 750 GB drive at this point, if I wanted, and then gradually go back to 4x 750 GB drives... But, I'm probably not going to do that.

It turns out that Seagate is dropping their warranties from 5 years to 3 years on Jan 3, 2009. I've got these drives now. If I return them and upgrade later, I'll only end up getting screwed on the warranty. Might as well give it a shot...

I also keep an off-site mirror of my data, so I'm not as concerned about things blowing up. It has saved my butt a few times after the ReadyNAS let me down and corrupted some data on a volume rebuild.