A few months ago I bought a 1TB WD1001FALS drive to replace the second 74GB Raptor that's died on me. (Bought one right after they came out, 8MB cache, died later, got a 16MB cache via RMA, that just died and it's out of warranty). My bulk storage device was a 500GB Seagate 7200.10.
74GB is not enough for anything really, and I was forced to run my 500GB external IDE drive that's permanently fused into it's USB enclosure with stripped screws as my boot drive with my SATA internal 500GB as bulk storage.
Now I've got the 500GB Seagate SATA as boot, the 1TB as bulk, and the USB as...USB. I've wanted a RAID 5 setup for years, but the drive I bought apparently has issues running any sort of RAID setup because of some deep recovery cycle WD put into it. Reading up on it, the drive will enter such cycle and drop off the visibility of the RAID card because of it.
I paid about $100 for this drive, and the RE edition version is about $150. I'm very much against spending $450 on another three drives because WD decided to screw us over. Are people right about this, and I need to get a whole set of RE-version drives? Or can I buy two more regular ones for $200, flip a switch and be fine?
hardware
prices 
