Write speeds thus far have been excellent. It's no SSD, but it is faster than the non-shingled 4TB WD Green drives.

There was a review online (lost the link) where somebody specifically tested that aspect, and his conclusion was "blazingly quick most of the time". Rewriting small files over and over did slow it down though.

I'm not a fan of any of the common RAID formats on multi-terrabyte drives for small systems use. The rebuild times and chances of multiple simultaneous failures are just too big.

A better solution is needed for small systems use. Something like UnRAID or mhddfs. Pity neither of those isn't more widely available for MSWin or OS/X. Or even for Linux: they exist, people like me use them, but not widely out there.

"JBOD" would be good, except it also takes the RAID approach of "a single drive failure kills the entire array". Ugh.

RAID0 at least doesn't have "rebuild" issues -- everything is lost on failure of any drive, so less time wasted restoring it than (say) RAID1 or RAID5.

EDIT: Say, what about something like ZFS ?

Cheers