I have 4x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS in RAID 5. One of the drive has started reporting an error. It is on a NVRAID on a XFX 680i lt board. I rebuilt the array twice with the same drive. drive would work for same length of time each time before it would degrade again. Ran Seagate Seatools and the drive passed, but degraded a 3rd time after same amount of time. This visit to Seagate's website now says firmware available, CC49. Note: only two drives at the time I built the array had the same version but Seagate said that they would distribute firmware. So now I am on the 4th rebuild, which is actually going slow like it is actually transferring data (hoping that is a good sign, and not due to the new firmware). I have the same model drive that I boot the OS, during the RAID diagnostics I found out this drive has two bad sectors...so I don't know if I really want to use this as a replacement drive if it comes to that.

So do I have to replace it exactly with another ST31000528AS? Which run $15+ more than newer model 1tb. Because I think it would be better to put the extra $15 toward total cost 4 higher capacity disks or a 160GB SSD for boot drive. I do have 160GB drive I can replace my boot 1TB disk to hold me over. I just don't know about it, though Seatools said it fixed the errors on that drive. Question is will they all start to fail soon since they are same age.