Sometimes Things Work Out - 300GB Seagate SATA

I ordered two 300GB Seagate SATA drives from Newegg --only thing is I ordered them a week apart. Don't do that. (And yes, I shouldn't have either but I changed my plans.)

What I ended up with was two drives that were just about identical --except one was made in Singapore and one in China and one had a 3.AAD firmware version while the other's firmware was at 3.AAE.

No big deal, right? Maybe. As stand-alone drives there'd certainly be no problem. However, these are destined for an ASUS P5WD2-E Premium motherboard in a RAID 1 config. Theoretically, it shouldn't make a difference in RAID either, or at least that's what the Seagate Tech Support guy initially said -until he added, "but if there is a problem, that's certainly the first place I'd look."

Is the needle on your "Hmmmmometer" pinned as mine was?

He continued after a short pause, "I'll need the part and serial numbers of the AAD drive." And when I read them off to him he said, "I'll kick this up to the engineers and sometime in the next day or two they'll send you the firmware upgrade code and instructions on how to do it."

Suddenly the dog stopped barking, the clouds parted, the sun came out, and the birds began to sing. It was a good day...