The 7200.11 debacle! It was unbelievable that it happened- as far as I remember, Seagate was the leader in reliability before then, I had created five or six RAIDs with Seagate drives with 100% reliability.
But when they released the 7200.11 versions....ALL 7200.11 models would spin down after idle for X minutes and then start clicking...the data was still intact, but for the drive to work again you had to pull the power.
I unfortunately built an eight drive RAID5 with these drives before the issue was know, which made it very difficult for me to diagnose the issue. (All drives seemed perfectly fine when powered and working for the first 5-10 minutes or whenever they were in use, but as soon as a single drive of the RAID idled, the RAID5 acted like a drive was bad).
I still have a box with eight 1TB Seagate 7200.11 drives that I never updated. I have never bought another Seagate drive for RAID since, always WD or Hitachi.
Yup. I had built a gaming/workstation desktop using 2x 7200.11's in RAID-0. It started acting up, at a lan party of all things, which made me suspect the RAID controller on the motherboard, especially after using the drives separately seemed to work ok. But then one of the drives died and then the other, both at pretty much the least convenient moments possible.
