I know the drive are the same, my main point is that most PCI IDE RAID controllers in the low end are simply IDE controllers and a special BIOS/driver to enable RAID by using the CPU to do everything.

Also, the firmware does make a difference on reliability. Most Compaq hard drives that go into servers have their monitoring set to very low thresholds, so a minor hickup will be reported, and may cause the server to flag the drive as one to replace soon.

Where as I have an ATA hard drive in my media system that dosen't even do DMA transfers anymore, randomly corrupts things, but in general still somewhat works. SMART hasn't gone off once.

Other area the firmware is useful, peformance. Until recently, no manufacturer implemented tag command queuing in ATA drives.

Good points though that most drives now are pretty iidentical in their physical charistics and such.

(too tired to bother fixing the spelling mistakes and not on a browser that red underlines them)