> The biggest issue isn't the spindown. Google 'WDTLER' and see the other, bigger, issue. In a nutshell, TLER (Time-Limited Error Recovery; see https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/TLER ) allows the drive to not try to recover soft errors quite as long. The error recovery time can cause the drive to drop out of RAID sets and be marked as faulted. Yes, I'm aware of that and it's the reason I have to replace drives developing reallocated sectors: they get dropped by my 3ware controllers. There's a penalty for using cheap drives, but there's also a benefit from the low heat and power savings. To me, drives and power supplies are a consumable item - something you're going to have to replace from time to time. I'm used to it since I service computers for a living. I've seen enterprise drives fail too, although probably not as often. By the way, I'm seeing too many ppl with failing SSD's to start relying on those yet. I own one so far, but it's not used much.