[plug] Experience with Hard disks

[Brad Campbell]

G'day all,

Putting the cart somewhat before the horse I have purchased 7 WD2000JB Drives and 7 Maxtor 
Maxline-II-250GB-SATA drives.

I have had 5 of the WD's for a while and reckon they are ok, what is the consensus on the Maxtors?

Now for years I have had only bad experience with Maxtor drives but these new Maxline-II drives have 
a 3 year warranty and Maxtor appear to be trying to position them as reliable server drives.
Does anyone have any opinion on them?

They are going to live in a pair of Supermicro SATA Chassis so they should be under control from a 
temperature and environment perspective.

http://www.supermicro.com/PRODUCT/Chassis/MobileRack.htm

I also have a Gigabyte GA7VT-600 Motherboard but I'm having problems with IDE channels locking up.
I have had the issues with the on-board ATA, an CMD680 PCI controller and a Highpoint 1540 
controller. I'm beginning to suspect the board or the bios and I'm looking to trade up to an ASUS 
A7V as I need 6 PCI slots. I have tried every available kernel 2.4 and 2.6 with various patch sets, 
but under constant writes (streaming sat tv to disk) it will get a channel lock up at some point 
within a couple of hours.

Anyone have any opinion on these boards?

Regards,
Brad