> Do you know if they ever performed well under NetBSD?

Unfortunately no, this is the first time I've tried this model; I was supposed 
to get the same kind of disks as the other machine has, but the vendor ran out 
of them so I got these two with a nice discount. I was originally planning to 
phase them out and replace them with 7200 RPM disks later.

> It is entirely possible that both of my drives started to have problems
> within 3 months of new.  I half-suspect that it was a design "feature"
> for low-power that is supposed to be turned on/off by a special driver
> for MonopolySoft.

I think these drives have performed like this since the day 1, I just realized 
it a week or two later as I was wondering why the other machine is so much 
faster.

I asked around on IRC, and found guys who had these drives. Atleast they worked 
under Linux.

-- 
Ari Sovijärvi
http://apz.fi/