That actually sounds really smart, but can that cause issues with the raid controller, since the drives will act slightly differently?

These all seem to be 7200rpm drives, would 5400rpm drives make a large difference in terms of longevity relative to that? Also seeing mixed results from seagate there, first they mention there being 0 failures of a couple seagate models, but then later in the graph of annualized failures, seagate in general has the highest failure rate