Bought mine a unit. Western Digital Blue Caviar 640GB 16MB 7200RPM SATA2 HDD for RM220. Definitely worth the price. Used to run on RAID 0 but realize the performance increase isn't worth the risk in data retention. My previous Maxtor (5 years old) combination creates missing programs every now and then. With this Blue Power HDD, the performance is more or less the same to me.

I guess the higher disk density and product improvement has increased its performance. Of course RAID 0 on a PC desktop environment isn't really that much of an improvement unless rendering comes into the picture.

This post has been edited by davidmak: Mar 23 2009, 11:15 AM

Shouldn't be a problem. If you dedicate it for storage and not operate it 24/7 the lifespan should be pretty long. I'm very confident of current generation of HDDs lasting 5 years of continuous use. The good thing is, when it is about to fail you should see the symptoms like abnormal operation noise (clicking, etc). Turn on SMART and keep a SMART utility running to keep tabs on the error rates.

If you value reliability and data retention, forget about RAID 0 unless you have another set of disks dedicated for performance operation. RAID 1 is good for mirroring. If you need performance and reliability then you may consider RAID 5 but that's pretty CPU intensive unless you have a dedicated controller for that. If RAID is not your taste, then you're fine with a single drive. Do remember that you need a stable system to begin with. Unstable SATA/IDE drivers can cause data corruption.