We ship voice recording and conferencing appliances based on Supermicro hardware, a RAID controller and 4x disks on RAID 10.<p>We tried to mitigate the failure interval on the drives by mixing brands. Our Supermicro distributor tried to really dissuade us from using mixed batches and brands of SAS drives in our servers. Really had to dig in our heels to get them to listen.<p>Even when you buy a NAS fully loaded like a Synology it comes with the same brand, model and batch of drives. In one case we saw 6 drive failures in two months for the same Synology NAS.<p>Wonder whether NetApp or EMC try mixing brands or at least batches on the appliances they ship?