WD Caviar Green drives - Only good for certain uses!

I originally set up my Mac Pro as follows:
Bay 1 - Original 640GB Drive - MacOSX
Bay 2 - 1.5TB Caviar Green - RAID 1 striped with Bay 3
Bay 3 - 1.5TB Caviar Green - RAID 1 striped with Bay 2
Bay 4 - 2.0TB Caviar Green - Time Machine Backup
The RAID 1 array was mounted as the /User directory.
From the start there were annoying lags on a semi-regular basis. Even with only a few things open, like 1 instance each of Dreamweaver, Safari, and iTunes, I would get the spinning beach-ball of death for a few seconds every 30-45 seconds, and sometimes for as long as 10-20 seconds. Occasionally iTunes would actually cut out as it tried to play music.
Whenever these problems got bad I checked the Activity Monitor, did a 'top' in the terminal, even ran diagnostics a few times. No problems were ever obvious. Tons of available CPU time, tons of available RAM, no disk problems. Still, the system ran like a 386 with 640kb of RAM, not a 3.0Ghz Quad-core Nehalem with 12GB of RAM!
I started suspecting the disks as the culprit and looked into the Caviar Green drives a little further...
Western Digital lists the spindle speed as "Variable 5400-7200 RPM'. In fact, each drive is tested to determine the speed with the best performance/economy balance, and that speed is locked into the drive. This means that two otherwise identical Caviar Green drives can have two widely different spindle speeds. Put those two into a striped RAID array, and you get the problems I had.
Before reporting a bad computer to AppleCare I decided to confirm the drive theory by replacing the two Caviar Green drives in the RAID array with Caviar Black drives. Right now I have 4 instances of Safari, 2 Terminals, 2 Finder windows, Dreamweaver, Remote Desktop, Photoshop and iTunes running, and have seen zero glitches so far. The system is finally running like it should! The Caviar Green drive I have in bay 4 as my Time Machine backup is fine - this is actually a good application for these quieter, lower power drives. Just don't put them into a RAID array where you expect reasonable performance!
The two Green drives are going back to NewEgg tomorrow (minus a restocking fee because I am past the 30-day return window).
P.S., The Caviar Black drives are just fine for a software-based RAID 0 or RAID 1 array like this. WD makes the more expensive RE3 drives for RAID arrays, but the only difference is the amount of time the drive is allowed to take for error recovery. The Black drive could be down long enough to be dropped from an array (10 seconds or more), but the RE3 always comes back within 7 seconds after error recovery to prevent this. So you only benefit from the RE3 drives if you are running with a hardware RAID card, like you'd need for RAID 5.

Sorry, typo...
Table should say RAID 0, not RAID 1:
Bay 1 - Original 640GB Drive - MacOSX
Bay 2 - 1.5TB Caviar Green - *RAID 0* striped with Bay 3
Bay 3 - 1.5TB Caviar Green - *RAID 0* striped with Bay 2
Bay 4 - 2.0TB Caviar Green - Time Machine Backup
The *RAID 0* array was mounted as the /User directory.

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