I'm wondering how much difference there exists between SATA and, say
FCAL drives when it comes to robustness.

I'm talking drives that will be more than 20% busy with seeks, always
spinning, in news servers. I've seen a too-high rate on FCAL disks used
as JBOD - about half the drives developing bad blocks, the other half
giving total failures - that I'm not sure going to mirrored SATA drives
is such a fine idea.

Would they wear out in a year, or would the reliability be reasonable?
Mirroring would catch most failures, but will the drive vendor complain
or stop support because of the failure rate?


Thomas