Don't buy Seagate

So back some months ago, I put together a RAID-5 array with 4 Seagate Baracuda 1TB drives. Ever since I built it, its acted a little funny on the boot up. It would hang on the detecting drives section, and then after about 10 seconds, I'd hear a "thunk" from a drive and it would continue booting up after that. And it wouldn't act up in any other way than that. Except sometimes it would hang forever on the detecting drive portion and I would never hear the sound. Well now it makes the Thunk sound a minute or two after windows loads and then my RAID controller goes nuts and says a drive failed. And let me tell you how fun it was when the RAID alarm went off at 5am this morning. Sounds like a loud digital alarm clock.

Called Seagate and its going back under warranty. But if I hadn't had it in an array and was just using it as a regular drive, like a normal person.... I'd be sweating against the clock trying to recover what I could from it, if I could get anything. I had bought this drive last fall. Its not old. Also Seagate has a huge problem with the firmware on these drives. They just aren't making good drives right now, and I thought I would warn anyone poor soul that reads this blog with that nugget of information.