I bought a WD Caviar Black 1TB - the same one that jimmylim85 asked about - and it developed read errors within a week. Fortunately, it was in a RAID1 with a Samsung 1TB (I deliberately bought a different make/model to rule out common causes of failure). Moral of the story - no matter what people tell you, never be blindly confident in single drives. Always have your data on RAID-1 (or other redundant config) and/or have a backup.

This statement belongs to 1999. RAID-5 is laughably CPU-intensive today. A modern CPU can handle thousands of MB/s of RAID5 XORs. That said, there are other good reasons to get a dedicated RAID controller - e.g. for the battery backup and port counts.

Very true.

Here's a question of logic and common sense: Let's say there's drive X and drive Y. If drive X fails on me, and I never bought drive Y before, does that mean drive Y is safer than drive X? Why? Why not? Think about it.

The Silent Killer has already said it well in his post #825. Read it.

I'm not sure about the other three, but the Seagate Freeagent 250GB is *very fast*. It reads at about 35MB/s, which is impressive for a USB hard disk.

It isn't with me anymore so I'm unable to test