[jevinskie]

I also had a RAID-5 array fail due to 3/4 drives failing near-simultaneously. All of the drives were from the same batch. Some months later, a friend came to me with a computer problem. Her drive had failed. I was able to take a look at the drive and, to my amazement, the drive was from the same batch! Based off of a wild hunch, I swapped the controller board from my one remaining good drive into my friend's drive. The drive worked fine and I was able to recover all her data! It is interesting that the drive failures were likely due to the fact that the drives were from from the same batch but also that fact probably allowed me to seamlessly swap the controller boards!