You can look for yourself using smartctl -- they still respond after the mechanical failure. Aside from pasting internal emails (not happening :)), you'll have

You can look for yourself using smartctl -- they still respond after the mechanical failure. Aside from pasting internal emails (not happening :)), you'll have to google for yourself on this one. We didn't do anything novel with these drives at a hardware level to make them fail, and we've got dozens of Constellations in an identical configuration that have had no failures after months of load. It's not transfer speed that they seem to trade off for, it's access times. That may have been part of the problem -- our reads are extremely random over a very broad range of sectors. This isn't exactly a log or video server usage model. :)