> it's often faster to just throw your hands up and work from the parity disk until you can diagnose the issue.

One of the advantages of enterprise drives is how long the drive spends error checking. Consumer drives spend considerably longer when it detects an error, and that can cause the RAID controller to drop the drive as malfunctioning. Then it has to rebuild the array or operate on hot spare.

There used to be a firmware setting you could toggle on the WD Caviar Black drives to effectively turn them into the RE (enterprise) drives. They've since made some design changes so that's no longer possible.