On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 9:08 AM, Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 22 May 2009, Robert Schnabel wrote:
>
>> No, the original drives I have work fine. The problem, as you point out,
>> is that Seagate changed the firmware and made it so that you cannot flash it
>> to a different version.
>
> The subtle point here is that whether a drive has been out long enough to
> have a stable firmware is very much a component of its overall quality and
> reliability--regardless of whether the drive works fine in any one system or
> not. The odds of you'll get a RAID compability breaking firmware change in
> the first few months a drive is on the market are painfully high.
Also keep in mind that 1.5 and 2TB drives that are out right now are
all consumer grade drives, built to be put into a workstation singly
or maybe in pairs. It's much less common to see such a change in
server class drives, because the manufacturers know where they'll be
used, and also because the server grade drives usually piggy back on
the workstation class drives for a lot of their tech and bios, so the
need for sudden changes are less common.