[baruch]

I've used mostly 7200rpm SATA and Nearline-SAS and they are mostly fine in fact, didn't play enough with higher rpm SAS yet but so far I don't see a big difference between them and the 7200 NL-SAS drives.

I'd echo the sentiment seen elsewhere in the comments about Seagate drives vs. Hitachi drives. Both for SATA and NL-SAS. Hitachi 1TB were rock solid compared to Seagate.

[tracker1]

Completely anecdotal... but, the 640gb two platter drives have seemed to be the most rock solid.. ymmv though... With the much larger, and much more expensive (since the taiwan floods) drives, who knows anymore... it's relatively anecdotal for anyone at this point, since after 3-5 years all the warranties have expired.