New RAID 5 Setup... need some advice

[tmclaugh]

I originally had a Highpoint Rocket RAID 2300 and four Enterprise Western Digital 400 GB HDs. The WD Hard drives had about three failures within a year, and in one particular instance two died at the same time... yeah, like that. Turns out that it was a bad run of drives. Well, now I know I need more redundancy and that RAID 5 definitely isn't the end all be all. But I still want to set up another raid with four drives.

I was thinking of investing in a "3ware 9650SE-4LPML" with battery backup and I'm trying to decide what drives to go with. I just read in another post that WD drives have a jumper to turn off the "TLED(?)" The case I'm going to use is fairly cramped, and I was wondering how the WD 1.5TB 5900 drives would work.

What do you guys think?

All input is appreciated.

 

[Concentric]

How much data do you need to store? How critical is it? How much do you want to spend? Any other constraints?

 

[tmclaugh]

I'm looking to store mainly movies and TV. I'm thinking about 4.5 GBs and it's not terribly important. I've learned that the important files should be saved and resaved on multiple formats. I was looking to spend $100 - $120 on each HD and about $400 on a decent PCIE card.

The highpoint seemed to be pretty slow at rebuilding and also seemed to drop hard drives occasionally.