At 09:51 AM 2/21/2006, you wrote:
About a year ago a 4 month old WD 2000JB went bad on me so while I was waiting for a replacement drive I bought one of the then new Maxtor 250 gig drives with 16 megs of cache. I thought that was very cool to have double the cache! Anyway, I got my WD back and it's been running fine ever since but now the Maxtor has gone bad.
The likelihood of having two top end drives go bad on you like that, within the time frames you specified, is extremely unlikely. I would be asking why, before I would trust that machine with my data again.