maybe because those suggesting this are not able to come up with a This really depends on your priorities, i would have replaced my drives well in advance of a similar situation. The only reason i can imagine for splitting a disk into many partitions and raiding them together is avoiding lenghty rebuilds when a single drive is kicked from an array due to a correctable read error. In practice the above scenario should not happen anymore, since md will retry writing a stripe if it gets a read-error, be...

'Excellent point. If the spec calls for a minimum of sectors, then it is quite possible a complaint drive might well have fewer sectors than the ones I used to build the array. OTOH, all of the 1T drives on my systems have precisely the same number of user available sectors, and all the 1.5T drives have the same number. Since the drives represent not only different models from one manufacturer but also different manufacturers, this suggests to me an adherence to a specific spec. On yet the oth...

So a company like Apple could never compete with IBM? There are myriad examples of non-compliant software and hardware being developed in a standards-based environment yet selling very well. I think maybe you are underestimating the vast buying power of individual consumers and non-enterprise businesses. The consumer sector has much different requirements than industry, government, or the military. If a non-compliant product is less expensive than a compliant one, it will often nonetheless s...