Mac Pro (First Generation) problem with 1TB Seagate Barracuda

Hi Macianer,
I have a first generation Mac Pro which was sold with max. 750GB Hard drives for each bay. At this time I am grabbing for straws and maybe someone has any info on this problem.
I purchased 4 x 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard drives ( Model: ST31000340AS / Firmware: SD15 ), did a regular format after I purchased them ( GUID Partition Table, Journaled HFS+ File System). I am using 2 of them internally (they get quite hot and i didn't want to put all 4 of them in there) and two of them externally (backup purposes). The other two internal bays are covered by 2x 500GB Barracuda drives.
I put all four 1 TB hard drived through a 1 week stress test to make sure I am not dealing with bad apples. So far this practice served me well.
Now 2 weeks later one completely crashed (internal boot drive). It sounded to spin up alright but was not accessible at all. I went to BestBuy and GeekSquad said this drive is crashed and I returned it.
Since I had a backup I didn't worry too much. I put the back up hard drive in as the new boot drive (since it was a SuperDuper duplicat) it worked like a charm. Now the second hard drive starts temporarily freezing the system for 2-4 minutes and seems to get stuck showing the great colored ball of doom. After the freeze it continues to operate normal again and I am able to continue my work.
I ran the Disk Utility and I got the following message:
INVALID KEY LENGTH
VOLUME CHECK FAILED.
ERROR: FILESYSTEM VERIFY OR REPAIR FAILED.
It just seems weird, I never had problems with hard drives and now I get these problems with 3-4 week old hard drives.
I was in a chat with seagate support. First question to trouble shoot: Do you have access to a PC. My answer was no since Microsoft Vista I donated all of them to the Salvation Army. He asked if I formatted the hard drives low level and MBR with HFS+. I said since I do not have access to PC nor do I plan on using my hard drives for PC I formatted it regular with GUID and HFS+. I asked if there is any history of these drives that would help explain my experience. I was hoping for a recall or something of that sort or something that a firmware upgrade would remedy.
I guess my question is, is the first generation Mac Pro, even though it seems to format and run them fine, not able to handle 1TB hard drives on a daily basis. Or am I dealing with hard drive problems? The Seagate guy didn't seem to be of any help.
Any help is appreciated or even pointers that would help me in finding the problem.
Cheers,
PixelGrinch
Message was edited by: PixelGrinch

Excellent questions, I too am looking at SSD.
Some things I know about SSD:
1. Intel recently released new firmware for their SSD drives to improve long term performance including Trim/Garbage collection.
2. SSD drives can be setup as SLC or MLC - SLC is faster read 2X, write 4X over MLC, however SLC is smaller capacity. SLC also has a longer life span.
3. Intel plans to have an 320GB X25-M (MLC) and a 128GB X25-E (SLC) out soon.
OSX does not fully support Trim and I'm not aware of any 3rd party software for OSX that helps in the garbage collection area. Diskeeper 2010 for Windows 7 provides full support for all variants of SSD, but nothing on the Mac side.
I'm probably going to wait for 2010 to see what comes out, SSD appears to be good news, but it still also seems to have issues. Given the cost of these drivers and the frequent firmware updates, a wait and see is my choice.
I've thought about going with a SAS RAID controller and 15K RAID drivers, but the cost/performance ratio comes out about the same and the 15K drives are noisey and power hungry but they're a "known" entity.
Rob

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