sATA (and in the near future SAS = serial attached SCSI) as a fairly new standard has still some teething troubles, dpending if your controller and disk are sATA I (1,5 Gb/s) or sATA II (3 Gb/s) and the respective fallback or backward compatibility works or not.
there have been similar problems from pATA 5 (100 Mb/s) to pATA 6 (133 Mb/s)
sATA III is on the horizon (6 Mb/s) and some sATA I devices cannot handle NCQ correctly if applicable, because this became standard not till sATA II

currently device multipliers can be found on some motherboards and controllers (up to 15 sATA devices on a single bus) which does also not work in all configurations - often you need to configure a drive manually (using jumpers or a tool) ... this troubles will pass by within the next year or so ...

WD's responsability seems to be not too quick - i've been 15 minutes on an international line today and finally gave up ... too bad the raptors are really great drives.

you might want to look at the new seagate products too - up to 133 MB/s throughput, around 9 ms latency though ... all using perpendicular recording meanwhile ... the 750 GB seagate drives are pretty usable for VSL libraries

christian

"I pointed out that this misinformation would likely steer quite a number of potential customers away from purchasing WD drives."

I hope it is of some vindication that I so exactly proved your point. From WD, I also followed a link to Apple on this subject that was dated 2002, which in computer years would be the Jurassic Age. Who's minding the store?

Thanks to you and Christian for your timely advice.