Hardware reliability . . . HD, MoBo, Sound, . . .

Hey ya'll -

I'm gonna be upgrading my box over the next couple months and with the hardware several generations ahead of where I'm at now I'm going to be investing some green in it so . . .

I want to get some feed back on my hardware performance over the past several years.

I've used mostly Western Digital or Seagate hard drives, mostly Seagate lately because it was recommended as having high reliability.

But it seems that consistently, my individual hard drives last about one year then crump. This has driven me to backup my OS's using Bootit NG frequently, lol.

My system is on much of the time, almost always say 18 hours a day, seven days a week. Sometimes 24 hours a day. I set the hard drives to turn off after 5 minutes when not accessed. They are adequately cooled. The last ones that just crumped were a Western Digital Ultra ATA and a Seagate SATA 7000.9 series. I just installed a RAID 0 using two 500 Gb Seagate 7000.11 series and am very happy with the performance gain but have read in a forum that RAID setups seem to last less than standard.

Questions: in general is this the kind of failure rate ya'll have been getting? What hard drive brands do ya'll have the most confidence in. How do ya'll see the reliability of the RAID 0 setups.

When I setup my RAID 0 I was unaware that Linux was stumped when faced with a mobo based RAID and therefor am unable to get Slackware to install

Just in the last week my Creative Labs Fatal1ty X-Fi Elite Pro crumped . . . $275 burnt up. That's the last time I'm spending that kind of cash for a friggin' sound card.

Questions: What sound cards do ya'll like for reliability, and how long do ya'll find they run before they fry.

Thankfully, I've had better reliability with my mobo A8N-SLI Deluxe but am still rather p*ssed that NVidea never could make an nvata.sys that wouldn't corrupt the data, so had to use the lower performance Microsoft driver. That was a $240 mobo. I've heard that the NVidea 790i mobo is having stability problems. I'm paranoid to buy anything NVidea but they seem to have the market by the balls.

Intel based chipsets are an option, but I've never had one. And will probably try ATI for graphics cards.

Questions: What mobo chipset do ya'll like. Those of you who have tried the ATI crossfire system, do you like it.

Thanks so much for your comments and recommendations.

Best regards, Doug