I've had 4 RAID arrays come in over the last 2 weeks that were using SAS drives. All were Seagates, one was an HP variation. In each array there was at least one, sometimes two, that looked like someone lit off a cherry bomb inside it. I mean total destruction of the head stack and platters. The heads didn't just fail, they were obliterated, with about 1/4 inch of the headstack completely shredded off. Anyone else seeing these?

I had 2 or 3 cases like that on HP servers as well.

Yes but not such a wreck... Seems like your drive kept running for a long time before the failure was noticed...

Seagate Desktop drives are also crap particularly 7200.12 series. Can anyone give feedback on Hitachi Desktop Drives? Interestingly there are hardly any posts for them ,is there failure rate is low or they are not used at all?
I have stopped using seagate & tried WD , but not impressed by them as well.

Don't mix apples with pears : SAS are usually intended for different use from mass market type and in theory should not be exposed to 'jackass' , so the failure analysis has sense.

I'm almost sure that most ran for an extended period of time. One thing I noticed is that even the remaining "good" drives appeared to be on the brink of failure. You could barely get an image of them. Some of them would be steadily buzzing, or have a low beeping tone to them, and just really struggled to image.

Update : at 13.00 local time just arrived an HP server for DR ...

Unbelievable, I just got another array in today with these drives. I was able to image 7 out of 8 drives (RAID 0). One drive was clicking. All the drives were a perfect matched set, so after they successfully imaged I used the heads out of one of them. The drive is still clicking after the head swap. I put the heads out of the bad drive into the good drive, and they worked fine. I changed the PCB's (swapped ROM), and again the bad drive clicked and the good drive worked fine. I'm thinking there's some damage to the SA? I don't know how I would get to terminal or what to look for with this drive, since these are fairly new for us. With as many as we've been getting in, I'm definitely making sure I try to learn as much as I can about them.