WD10EAVS 1tb Western Digital "Green Power" Hard Drive

Yes, I know this reads like an advertisement but in a sense it is. I bought (back when it was a great deal) a 750gb WD Green power drive for 135$. A *steal* at that price.
Then suddenly 2 months later Buy.com offered a 25$ off coupon and a 1 tb green power drive (WD10EACS) for 187-25 + free shipping. A *STEAL* at that price. Since the green power drives spin so slow (5400 RPM) and are ultra quiet they make perfect HTPC drives. Now a couple of hundred movies later and things start to get interesting and you need more space, so you start looking for a new drive...
Which brings us to the WD10EAVS. This drive doesn't officially exist on Western Digital's website and, prior to my purchase, I had no idea what its specs would be. I had seen them listed on a few pages talking about MyBook external USB/Firewire devices, but for the most part these drives were just a big unknown. And so at 179.99, free shipping and a 35% rebate (Thanks Microsoft!) a 1tb drive could be had for 117$- a tremendous steal. Lots of stealing going on.
Unfortunately when the drive arrived it had NO WD warranty - I've contacted the ebay seller about that little tidbit- so this might become a very expensive lesson.
Fortunately I was able to plop the drive into my C2D system and run a quick pair of benchmarks on it- the sustained bandwidth transfer is incredible for this drive- starts at well over 100mb/sec and drops to a paltry 40mb/sec- but in either case this is STILL fast enough to record video with. I'm in LOVE. A little history- I currently capture on a pair of Maxtor 320gb HDs in RAID-0 running on a dedicated hardware raid card, PCIE-4x. The new C2D board I bought didn't have a dedicated 4X slot like the AMD 760 chipset I came from, so I had to settle for significantly degraded video performance. That meant disabling my 16x PCIE graphics card (passive cooled for noise) and castrating it- by telling the system that it should run both PCIE 16x slots as 2x 8x slots. Very annoying. Even then the RAID-0 is capable of capturing at 140mb/sec all the way out to 50%, and even then it only falls to 80mb/sec at the very end. MORE than fast enough to capture standard and HD video (for now).
The RAID-5 (dedicated card) is a bit slower, as you'd expect, and is built upon 4x WD5000AAKS system. These drives were pretty expensive at the time but, again, worth it. I was moving upwards from 4x 200gb Seagate RAID 5 system and I needed to expand. Digital photography and digital video consume tremendous amounts of space. I think at this point I may replace all 4 drives with 1tb as soon as the price comes down and continue to rotate them in and out for backup purposes, which leads me to dispose of my 200gb PATA drives for something other than a pittance.
Now, back to the real reason I bought the 1tb WD10EAVS drive- I needed to add more space to the media box that my gorgeous wife likes to watch. I found a live-cd called 'clonezilla' - and it was everything they said it was. Not only did it clone the 3.2gb partition of the main boot disk (I was running an old 7200 RPM WD drive that sounded like a muffled screeching vacuum) but it repaired GRUB and modified LILO/bootloader to work correctly. And it did it in less than 20 minutes- all I had to do was type 'yes' 2x for every question. Talk about working correctly... this baby is DEFINITELY going into my emergency supply kit. So what's all this got to do with a baby and being a new daddy? Well, I put the first disk on there- Baby Einstein. Heh :) That and a few hundred hours of music....