So you are using a defective drive, one that you know is defective, and complaining about its reliablility, and therefore the reliability of all such drives?

Excuse me while I barf!

EDIT:

Tagged queuing is way overrated, though it does appear to give windows a boost of some kind (pretty much anything could help windows..). SCSI drives/controllers haven't had it for very long either, and at the same spin rate ATA drives normally outperform their SCSI brethern even without it.

I did a lot of work last year on a nice tagged-queuing controller for ATA drives, and with 7200rpm ATA mechanisms attached to it, it outperforms 10000rpm SCSI drives on a decent SCSI adapter under Windows, using tagged queuing.

But oddly enough, toggling tagged-queuing doesn't make as huge a difference with the same hardware under Linux -- the kernel already orders transactions fairly well, so unless one is using too small of a stripe size or some such thing, it's only worth a few percent, if that.

Managing a RAID in software is hardly any noticeable workload (Linux, FreeBSD) versus having a single card (bottleneck) do it all in firmware, unless one is using a ridiculously tiny stripe size (less than 128KB; 256KB is often better). Recalculating parity for RAID5 writes can be a little expensive, but if the system is that busy with I/O, then the CPU probably has enough spare cycles while it's waiting, so no big deal. Except on really big servers.

Here's a nice paper that discusses lots of RAID considerations: http://www.vinumvm.org/vinum/fullintro.html

Cheers