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The 1TB drive failue is a very widespread problem. There are many threads from many forums (not just the Seagate forum) regarding this particular issue. I'm going to make a little summary below.

1. The problem is BIOS no detect after a few months of usage (typically 3 months)
2. This problem applies to, ST31000340as, SD15, Thailand, Seagate 1TB drive
3. There are also problems for Segate 1.5TB, 640GB and 500GB. The 1.5TB drive's problem seems to be fixed by the newer firmware. The problems are a bit different from the 1TB SD15 problem (those drives didn't die completely).
4. Until today, Segate denied there is problem with SD15 1TB drive. SD15 is still the newest firmware.
5. If you RMA today, you are likely to get the bad drive again which is likely to fail another 3 months later. That's why I haven't RMA it yet.
6. Calling them you will get no help because they haven't acknowledge this problem offically yet.
7. Email them and you won't get any response.
8. This problem is very widespread (go to any place that sells this drive and with a online forum, you will see what I meant. e.g. newegg, ncix, amazon)
9. The previous firmware SD14 has some performance issues. But I haven't heard of any dramatic failure for that version (Some Dead on arrival, but those are "normal" :) . By fixing the performance issue, SD15 introduced some serious bug. I suspect it's 100% failure after about 3 months of usage, but there's no way to verify this claim.
10. "Papadenadia" is probably just "Hamartolos" in disguise, who I suspected is the alter ego of this forum's moderator AlanM. But again, I've no way to verify this accusation. It's possible I'm accusing the innocent (unless this post got deleted or modified without my consent).
11. In most of the cases (applying only to no detect issue), the data are recoverable, but you have to pay for the recovery service. I haven't heard of any free solution yet.
12. Switching the PCB doesn't work.
13. No software solution I have heard of.
14. In most cases, the drive is still intact. No abnormal "clicking" sound (if it does, it's a different issue).
15. At the time of my purchase (August), there was no negative posting regarding this issue. There were a few "Dead on Arrival", but like I said, those happened to all drives.
16. The earliest complaints regarding this issue I've seen is around late October. It's more frequent in December (someone who has more time than me may want to do a more scientific count). So this problem is just starting to surface.

You got that from the above posts but you didn't get this:

What they don't tell you is that you can create a self-booting (MS)-DOS floppy/CD so you can test your drive, regardless of your OS (as long as the system is X86). Get it here: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/seatooldreg [seagate.com] but if you DO need to flash it, you have to contact Seagate via Email and wait for a response and code so you can use yet another program to flash the drive.

He seemed to be talking about the fact that is was more important for them to direct people to the Windows tool than it was to even mention the DOS tool. That is this was a pretty badly done page.

This is the sort of thing that drove me away from the GLBT community. They so often indulge the same sort of thinking that their opposition does. Never miss an opportunity to piss on someone despite the fact that he's not even talking about what you say he's talking about.

I tried getting through their contact page. It was incredibly frustrating, and they won't even let you contact them unless you agree to some ridiculous terms absolving them from anything and everything, allowing them to email you whenever they want, stuff like that, in order to signup for an account.

Google's a little more helpful. This page at least might be kinda sorta related: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/other_downloads/cuda-fw

Then I tried to search for some of the terms in the title of the page (eg. "SD14") and it couldn't find any pages. That's some search function you've got there, Seagate -- it isn't by any chance hooked up to an empty database is it? Did you by chance have it on a 7200.11 drive?

Sadly, many of the Seagate HDDs are losing the 5 year warranty and moving to three. Here.

How, as a "computer repairman," can you be so woefully incorrect regarding HDD manufacturers? Quantum was purchased by Maxtor, not IBM. Maxtor, in turn, was purchased by Seagate. In a related not, as of Jan 3, 2009, many of the Seagate HDDs (all of the internal OEM drives AFAICT) are moving to a three year warranty.

And, of course, the Seagate referenced page says: "This can be done in Windows - it's easy! Download and run, or simply run as is, the Seagate Drive Detect software program." No mention of Linux, MacOS, Solaris, or BSD. So I guess there is an implied "If you are not using Windows - it's hard!".

Then later in the page, "you can download SeaTools for Windows" with a convenient link. Again, no mention of Linux, MacOS, Solaris, or BSD.

What they don't tell you is that you can create a self-booting (MS)-DOS floppy/CD so you can test your drive, regardless of your OS (as long as the system is X86). Get it here: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/seatooldreg but if you DO need to flash it, you have to contact Seagate via Email and wait for a response and code so you can use yet another program to flash the drive.

Too bad all major HD manufactures claim 10,000 power cycles, and many power saving settings will turn off a HD w/o doing anything else.

That number sounded wrong, so I checked some typical 3.5" desktop hard drives. These are the first three I looked at.

Seagate 7200.10 : 50 000 start/stop cycles.
WD Caviar Blue : 50 000 start/stop cycles.
Hitachi Deskstar T7K500 : 50 000 start/stop cycles.

Since Seagate bought Maxtor and Hitachi bought IBM's storage division, those three are all the major manufacturers of desktop hard drives.

Head wear is the limitation with stopping and starting typical desktop hard drives. Desktop drives typically park their heads on a laser-etched landing zone at the centre of the platters. Spinning up the drive causes wear as the heads drag on the surface until the air cushion is developed - the laser etching roughens the surface, allowing the heads to slide more easily. Most laptop drives park their heads on a ramp, so the platters can spin up with no head contact and can take an order of magnitude more cycles (specified as load/unload).

Has any company that makes electronic/mechanical (complex) devices shipped 1B of anything?

Seagate claims to have shipped 1 billion hard drives.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=null&vgnextoid=43afb55a61379110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD

Four easy steps to dead-cheap SAN/NAS storage:

1. Buy HP DL180 or DL185 servers, with a Smart Array P800 RAID card
2. Buy 12 to 14 1TB or even 1.5TB hard disks from Seagate and trays in eBay (I've bought in the past from SCSITray and there are other sellers)
3. Install Solaris 10 or Nexenta OS, set up ZFS
4. Sun goes bankrupt

Seagate ES.2 (Cheap SATA RAID drive) 1 in 10E15: Link
Seagate Cheetah 15k.6 1 in 10E16: Link

Seagate ES.2 (Cheap SATA RAID drive) 1 in 10E15: Link
Seagate Cheetah 15k.6 1 in 10E16: Link

Seagate Barracuda has been long known for excellent speed and reliability for high workstation workloads, not huge capacity. They made it a generic thing with range from 80 GB (the real one) to 1.5 TB.

They make up great model names and make it a generic thing with horrible speed issue. Look at this mess yourself: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/desktops/barracuda_hard_drives/

Lets hope we don't see a 2 TB Cheetah with horrible transfer speeds.

They should give up everything in hand and design an actual accessible hybrid drive with an innovative cache mechanism. I am not speaking about the 32 MB cache, something else... Like a cache which has clue about filesystems in use etc. With Laptops taking over the scene and UPS sells for $50, that dinosaur RAM cache mechanism must change.

I have a few of these drives... they are very fast for sequential read (>120MB/s sustained)

However, if write-cache is enabled (default) Linux will freeze intermittently reporting a SATA timeout executing a cache-flush command.
Tested with the 2.6.24 and 2.6.26 kernels. Other people have reported the same problem with the 2.6.27 kernel.
Tested with multiple drives and multiple SATA controllers (different chipsets). No SMART errors logged.

Thread on the Seagate support forum: http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=2390

The workaround is to disable write-cache on the drive.

A Western Digital VelociRaptor? seriously? once again performance PCs miss the boat.

SCSI outperform SATA.

http://www.superwarehouse.com/Maxtor_Atlas_300GB_Hard_Drive/8D300L0/ps/468903

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=a6c7a3b7b59ad010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&locale=en-US

If you want performance, use SCSI if you want cost saving, use SATA.

more info on hardware based encryption... http://www.scmagazineus.com/Crypto-chip-How-the-TPM-bolsters-enterprise-security/article/111865/ IMO best choice FDE drive, they come from Seagate, fujitsu and hitachi. Seagate has best "out of box" solution. FDE is faster, cheaper, easiest to use, easiest to manage. http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/laptops/momentus/momentus_5400_fde.2/ (Since your not managing large numbers you don't need the servers...if you did manage 10-100,000, the servers would be a must, and well worth it) Dell and Lenovo now sell laptops with the choice of FDE drives. check out vendor www.wave.com, awesome customer service (these guys know what they're doing)

I've seen this eluded to earlier in the thread, but personally I think it worth looking at HD's that support native FDE instead of a software solution. You don't have the same OS limitations, performance hits, or potential incompatibilities. Nearly all drive manufacturers have announced some sort of native encryption and some are already shipping. We are using Seagate drives today in our Dell systems and its incredibly painless.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/laptops/momentus/momentus_5400_fde.2/

They all advertise longevity, and they all lie, the legal way; with statistics!

The whole Barracuda line has an advertised MTBF of 750,000 hours (yes, 85+ years, really) and an annualized failure rate of 0.34%. That is actually pretty much typical of hard drive advertising. Most people don't have the balls to advertise product lifetimes more than about twice as long as the basic technology has been in around, but hard drive makers don't even blink.

Of course, MTBF and AFR are actually technical terms, with very specific meanings that are wildly different from what you'd think they meant if you didn't already know better. I wonder if the marketing department is using the confusion between the proper and assumed meanings of those terms to, ahem, "let" people think that drives are more reliable than they really are...

Seagate also makes a hybrid hard drive.

ps why would you link to engadget?

Apparently, you have no experience with high performance drives. 15k SAS drives max out around 300 GB.

See Cheetah capacities

SATA's and lower performing SAS drives come in higher capacities. I've never understood why. If some storage expert would like to explain I'd love to hear it.

I find that hard to believe. Looking around their products pages, it appears that 1TB is the highest capacity offered for some of their models. Am I just missing something?

Either way, congrats to Seagate, it is a very remarkable milestone.

Um, is this what you're looking for with regards to address information?

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/

They own a bunch of other companies / imprints too. See Wikipedia for that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagate_Technology#Corporate_affairs

Google is your friend! (If only for searching things and not privacy, mayhaps.)

Your transfer limit is either:

1) Lack of GigE switch between the machines, or a really really poor GigE switch (80 mbps - that sounds like Fast Ethernet)
2) Poor GigE chipset(s) on the mobo.
3) Poor CPU - rsync and scp encrypt the transfer which uses alot of cpu at each end. Also, GigE generates a fantastic number of interrupts/sec. Intel's Pro/1000 GT has an "Interrupt Moderation" feature to help with that.
4) Your hard drive speed. GigE is faster than most single hard drives. Seagate's Savvio 15k could maybe push it, with a STR of 117-97 MBps. A 10k Raptor is only 84 MB/s STR.

Run iPerf between two machines and see what your hardware can really do. (Quick tutorial, run `iperf -s` on one machine and `iperf -c {ip of other machine}` on the other. Then reverse the roles. FYI for a Lan, no IP Stack tuning is necessary)

Yes, trying to get what Gig-E promises has pissed me off too.

You might want to get a DAVE. 60GiB and you can stream video/music to your iPod Touch or iPhone (or a litany of other bluetooth/wifi enabled devices). Should be out sometime this year i think (the press release isn't entirely clear).

Hard Drive DVD ROM Case

Other software:

0. Install DSL to hard disk, reboot, and configure

1. Upgrade (Apps->Tools) to gnu utils

2. Install gcc

3. Install zile (MyDSL) for editing convenience

4. Other software (for building natively and installation):

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.7/linux-2.6.23.tar.bz2

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.95.tar.gz

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.4.tar.bz2

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.tar.bz2

http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/download/lzo-2.02.tar.gz

http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

http://www/perl.com/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.8.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61.tar.bz2

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-1.5.24.tar.gz

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R3/src/everything/index.html

`grep bz2 index.html | sed s/^.*\.bz2\"\>// | sed s/\<.*// | sed s,^,http://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/X11R7.3/src/everything/,`

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org?p=xorg/util/modular.git;a=blob_plain;f=build-from-tarballs.sh

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/libpng/libpng-1.2.24.tar.gz

http://www.fontconfig.org/release/fontconfig-2.5.0.tar.gz

http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.bz2

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/libxcb-1.1.tar.bz2

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxslt-1.1.22.tar.gz

ftp://xmlsort.org/libxslt/libxml2-2.6.30.tar.gz

http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist/xcb-proto-1.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/pthread-stubs/libpthread-stubs-0.1.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xau/libXau-1.0.3.tar.bz2

http://www.paldo.org/paldo/sources/xproto/xproto-7.0.11.tar.bz2

I'll start off by saying I don't intend this to be flamebait, and that I've read the article but not all the responses.

1. http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=freeagent-pro-320gb-usb2.0-esata-firew-external-hd&vgnextoid=0e4e26bbdae90110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&vgnextchannel=03d5368407f70110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&reqPage=Model

Where does it say here that is supports Linux??

2. From what I've read from http://alienghic.livejournal.com/382903.html the drive has no spin-down/up problems on the e-SATA interface in Linux. Equally it has no problems with USB in Windows. So surely the issue is how Linux is handling this power state feature (or USB)? Why does it have to be the manufacturers fault if they implement something that it is not neccesarily handled correctly or at all by Linux, yet is on another OS (heaven forbid that OS by Windows).

Now I'm sure this will cause some anger amongst the /. crowd, which isn't my intention but perhaps it isn't fair to blame the manufacturer if the real cause is the OS?

Oh, and I guess I won't be buying that cute lil 120GB version of the drive, or any more external Seagates. I just went to their support site and filled out an email support request asking what is wrong with their hard drive, I recommend you all do the same! http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/

I love Linux (GNU/Linux) and I use it most of the time, but this article is just crap.

A search on Seagate's site shows that they are working with Linux probably as much as they are "creating exclusive drives" for Windows:

https://search.seagate.com/wwwsearch/www3search.jsp?qt=linux&x=0&y=0&la=en&style=wwwenus&col=en-USall

Seagate Utility for Windows

Here is a link to a utility by Seagate that, among other things, will allow you to adjust the spindown time of FreeAgent drives. Windows only.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=freeagent-downloads&vgnextoid=3723b5b59b7d5110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD

Marketing people in technological companies often have no knowledge of technology and don't think it is important to have any.

Western Digital GreenPower Hard Drives seem to be heavily influenced by that attitude. There seems to be no information about actual speed, giving the impression that arrogant marketing people have decided that technically knowledgeable people can be manipulated, and won't notice that lack of specifications.

It's difficult to compete with Seagate's 5-Year Warranty, reliability is extremely important in most cases. The cost of a drive failure is far greater than any energy savings, except perhaps in large data centers with special software. The 5-year warranty says that Seagate management believes in the reliability of their hard drives, and will pay if they aren't reliable.

Both the Western Digital and Seagate web sites show the lack of interest in technology that is due to the arrogance of marketing people. The WD web site is heavily dependent on JavaScript; web site designers want to add JavaScript to their resume, but don't want to take the time to understand a complicated computer programming language, so JavaScript is often poorly written. The WD web site advises me that WD Enterprise Class GreenPower drives can hold "Up to 250,000 songs (MP3)". I imagine that will impress Slashdot readers who buy hardware for data centers. NOT.

The Seagate web site advises me that the search facility uses a certificate that is out of date. I am also advised to upgrade my version of Flash; I guess Seagate is sucked in by Macromedia/Adobe's method of advertising its name: Make everyone who visits web sites with Flash frequently see an advertisement to visit the Flash web site. Do that by bringing out numerous versions of Flash, and advising visitors to "updgrade".

The Seagate web site Flash is especially embarrassing. It says "Your On". Click on the Flash and it talks about "leveraging", a favorite word of those who don't understand technology. The CEO of Seagate supposedly tells us, "The explosive growth in digital devices, applications and content is breathtaking..."

The marketing of technical products is usually incompetent, dishonest, despicable, and self-destructive.

Marketing people in technological companies often have no knowledge of technology and don't think it is important to have any.

Western Digital GreenPower Hard Drives seem to be heavily influenced by that attitude. There seems to be no information about actual speed, giving the impression that arrogant marketing people have decided that technically knowledgeable people can be manipulated, and won't notice that lack of specifications.

It's difficult to compete with Seagate's 5-Year Warranty, reliability is extremely important in most cases. The cost of a drive failure is far greater than any energy savings, except perhaps in large data centers with special software. The 5-year warranty says that Seagate management believes in the reliability of their hard drives, and will pay if they aren't reliable.

Both the Western Digital and Seagate web sites show the lack of interest in technology that is due to the arrogance of marketing people. The WD web site is heavily dependent on JavaScript; web site designers want to add JavaScript to their resume, but don't want to take the time to understand a complicated computer programming language, so JavaScript is often poorly written. The WD web site advises me that WD Enterprise Class GreenPower drives can hold "Up to 250,000 songs (MP3)". I imagine that will impress Slashdot readers who buy hardware for data centers. NOT.

The Seagate web site advises me that the search facility uses a certificate that is out of date. I am also advised to upgrade my version of Flash; I guess Seagate is sucked in by Macromedia/Adobe's method of advertising its name: Make everyone who visits web sites with Flash frequently see an advertisement to visit the Flash web site. Do that by bringing out numerous versions of Flash, and advising visitors to "updgrade".

The Seagate web site Flash is especially embarrassing. It says "Your On". Click on the Flash and it talks about "leveraging", a favorite word of those who don't understand technology. The CEO of Seagate supposedly tells us, "The explosive growth in digital devices, applications and content is breathtaking..."

The marketing of technical products is usually incompetent, dishonest, despicable, and self-destructive.

The Virus definition at: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/personal_storage/ps3200-sw says that it's a Keylogger to steal username:password combinations for popular computer games at eastern Asia. World of Warcraft is the only western game that it is looking for.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/personal_storage/ps3200-sw click throughable!

That URL doesn't work because you tacked on a trailing / somehow.

Here it is without the trailing / :

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/personal_storage/ps3200-sw

Or google "ps3200 trojan".

What is interesting to note from that Segate page is that it claims the aim of the virus is to search for passwords for MMORPGs.

Strangely enough, I've seen several EULAs with 'no weapons' clauses. (The Linux version of Seatools lacks that section for some reason.)

Can't read can you asshole. I said I stopped buying Maxtor over 4 years ago.. that would be 2003. If you read this: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=Seagate_Technology_To__Acquire_Maxtor_Corporation&vgnextoid=1e8a814fef83e010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD Segate bought Maxtor 2 years after that.

In the case of the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 (I have one as well), that 600,000 number comes right from the data sheet (PDF).

http://www.seagate.com/ has a press release on their home page.

Nothing personal, but you might want to consider getting your hard drive specs elsewhere. I prefer going directly to the manufacturer's site. The 7200.10 specification sheet {in .PDF format} for the Barracuda line is here.

Its not less RAM, all the 7200.10 perp drives are 16 meg cache, at least all the ones above 300 gigs are. And looks like some of the 250gig as well
http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_ barracuda_7200_10.pdf

Its only when you get down to the 80 and 120 gig sizes that the cache is reduced. And thats to save money on the production costs since the drive itself sells for less. If people want a cheaper, smaller capacity drive, they aren't likely to be willing to pay more for the 16 meg cache.

So "less RAM" can pretty much be eliminated. Your other theories could still be correct though. I personally would lean towards a bug, one that passed the Q&A because it didn't affect all performance characteristics of the drive.

I don't know if you knew this, but Seagate acquired Maxtor a while ago.

http://www.seagate.com/maxtor/

Seagate does sell a drive with hardware based encryption, but "modern disk drives" is an exageration.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/laptops/ momentus/momentus_5400_fde.2/

From what I've found, only Seagate and one company I've never heard of offer drives with hardware based encryption.

http://www.full-disk-encryption.net/Full_Disc_Encr yption.html

Of course, you can always go the route of a host controller that has hardware based encryption, and then you don't have to trust the drive at all.

On-disk encryption is why the U.S. government would be nervous about Chinese ownership of Seagate. They'd be afraid of a back door in their "secure" hard drives.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US &name=chinaworkculture&vgnextoid=8196c24cf3dad010V gnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD The politicians are about 15 years too late.

Well Seagate say a maximum drive temperature of 60C

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/ata/10 0389997c.pdf page 12

But that might not be the whole story

From here
http://www.calce.umd.edu/whats_new/2003/1203.pdf
"Nakamura (2001) derived an activation energy of 1.27 eV for the fatigue of piggyback PZT actuators, a common wearout mechanism, which resulted in a predicted lifetime of 6.4 years when operating at 3 kHz at 25C."

Googling for the paper I can only get the abstract
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/i el5/20/19818/00917646.pdf?arnumber=917646
"Summary:The experimental lifetime predictive equation for a piggyback PZT actuator was derived. A piggyback actuator is a fine actuator of a dual-stage servo system that is essential to increase the recording density of hard disk drives (HDD's). The obtained equation agrees with Arrhenius' equation."

Arrhenius's equation give a reaction rate which is exponential with temperature

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~wwalsh/arrhenius.html

So the drive will fail faster at 60C than at 25C. You could actually work out the constants in the equation from the figures in the first link and then work out the fail time at 60C. I can convince myself to spend a few dollars on a big fan from the above graph though. This guy

http://www.silentmods.com/section2/item213/part3

says "At the temperature of 65 C the life time of hard disks is shortened two times if not more.". Looking at the Arrhenius graphs above that might well be the case.

Or if you can't fit a fan to you Mac, try to get a low power drive. Either a 5400rpm one, or even a 2.5" one and an adaptor. Since you need an adaptor anyway, you could even get a 2.5" SATA drive and a mounting kit (ideally one that acts like a big heatsink) and connect it via a PATA to SATA dongle.

My PVR is less than a year old. It, as well as the HD model that's now part of the same range, both use IDE drives. In fact, I believe that most PVR models do the same.

The recommended replacement drives (or upgrade drives for those looking for more capacity) are from Seagate: the .

If/when Seagate pulls out of this market, the price of new PVRs probably won't be affected at all, but it may well drive the price of repairing/upgrading existing models up a bit.

Bottom line to PVR users: upgrade that drive while you can.

Not that I think that home grown storage is necessarily a good fit for
To be fair, Seagate does list MTBF if you look at the data sheet for SATA drives actually sold for enterprise applications.

I'll agree, however, that home grown solutions are only approrpriate for a limited number of applications where outlay costs are more important that reliability and support.

Businesses buy SANs to consolidate storage, placing all their eggs in one basket. They need redundant everything, which this doesn't have. Additionally, SATA drives are not as reliable long term as SCSI. Compare the data sheets for Seagate drives, they don't even mention MTBF on the SATA sheet.
Businesses also want service and support. They want the system to phone home when a drive starts getting errors, so a tech shows up at their door with a new drive before they even notice there are problems. They want to have highly trained tech support available 24/7 and parts available within 4 hours for as long as they own the SAN.
Finally, the performance of this solution almost certainly pales as compared to a real SAN. These are all things that a home grown solution doesn't offer. Saving 47K on a SAN is great, unless it breaks 3 years from now and your company is out of business 3 days waiting for a replacement motherboard off Ebay.
That being said, everything has a cost associated with it. If management is ok with saving actual money in the short term by giving up long term reliability and performance, then go for it. But by all means, get a rep from EMC or HP in so the decision makers completely understand what they're buying.