Does what it's supposed to, reliably

Strengths:

I'm running 3 of these in a RAID 5 setup on Windows Storage Server 2008 with an Adaptec Controller. I use them as an iSCSI storage adapter in ESXi running over a single dedicated gigabit channel to a DELL T310 Xeon w/ 32GB of RAM. Running about 8 VM's 24/7 with room to spare. The drives have been in use for a year now with no SMART errors reported. They still sound healthy too.

Weaknesses:

As with all HDs, they are mechanical and will eventually fail. Keep a hot-spare if you can afford it and always keep a recent back-up of your data.

Summary:

Before these drives I've been running 2 WD Caviar Black's, those have been good for 3 years now. Besides parity, RE's are much the same platform as the Blacks. We replace bad Seagates with RE4's at work too.