Within the span of a month:
– The third replacement of a Maxtor 200GB drive died in my second workstation, one month out of warranty. Data corrupt but recovered somewhat.
– A Maxtor 40GB drive in my main workstation died a click of death while running. Total loss.
– An attempted upgrade of my main workstation failed because I have a MS-6905 1.1 Rev B, the revision that happened to be recalled by MSI at some point years past. Of course, the recall is no longer honored.
– Upgrading the fileserver with a used 3ware card and 250GB Seagate drives in RAID5. Of course, it doesn't work. (6410) Fortunately, the seller refunded our money even though he claimed it worked.
– Obtained a 3ware 7504. It was working fine. Tonight the driver reported that the controller was not responding and kicked the array offline, necessitating a reboot. Of course this meant all the AFS volumes with open files need to be salvaged. And I'm certain this will happen again.
The moral of the story is to expect that anything even remotely related to a hard drive will fail in spectacular fashion at the point when it would cost you the most for it to do so.