Up until I went on my own I worked for a manufacturer as an SSE and Network designer, specialty on Suns, EMC, ADIC robotics the Extreme and cisco L3 switches as well as building and configuring Cisco 7000 series routers. Spent some time in the back on the workbenches with the production crews when 8 of us were cranking out 480 systems a week for the postoffice. As for getting those nice HP DD4's, what can I say, right place at the right time.
Here is the problem in a nutshell, the 5400rpm drives are the most reliable, when I find them in the 10-20gb range from maxtor I snap them up, WD and Seagates run too hot, eide or scsi and need alot of cooling. They run idealy in the antec cases that have the extra fan bay in the drive cage or like in my box hill arrays which have 3 fans in them, one in each tray and two in the cannister the tray slides into.
The problem I have is that if you say clone a drive running win2k to a new drive and reboot with both drives connected the system will hang and not boot off of either of them. I'm trying to figure out how to make the bad drive a drive that won't try to boot. I just discovered this last month but now I have an incentive to figure it out. Probably tackle it sometime this week but I have 4 new linux dns servers and 2 2600 cicsos plus two pix's I need to get up by friday for two customers and bring their new dual T's on line.
We did find out that out of all the drives, numbers wise, the maxtors were the least prone to failure. We also started adding an additonal fan to the cases for more air flow and routed our cables so as not to block air flow over the hard drives themselves, the $5 the extra fan cost was more than off set by the savings in, bench time, new drive and cloning, RMA back to maxtor or WD, packing and shipping on customer returns. Thats one of the reasons I hate buying in bulk, I buy retail pack on HD, MB, CPU, that way I get 3year manufactures warranty and dont have to eat it myself, I slipped up on these last hard drives, only came with a 30day and I'm 14 days over, we'll negotiate for for $30 ea I couldn't pass that up