Hmm. Not Seagate's fault.

[mdlbear]

The new disk, in an external USB/eSATA enclosure, wouldn't stay up more than a couple of minutes at a time. And it wasn't spinning, down, either: just locking up. OK, that's not a hardware problem; it's probably the kernel not dealing properly with something in SATA II. Installed 2.6.22 from backports, and it seems to have worked. USB was horribly slow, and it doesn't seem to handle hotplugging an eSATA drive, but after a reboot it seems perfectly happy. The same kernel in the fileserver has been up ever since I installed it, and my Ubuntu-based recording studio hasn't had any problems.

So I'll have a couple of 400GB SATA drives free pretty soon. Three once I upgrade the mirror drive, but I want to wait for the price to come down a little. RAID box?

1/14 I may have spoken too soon -- there may also be some kind of controller issue. Or something. I'm dropping back to IDE on the fileserver.