Anybody ever heard of them? I need to buy 3x 1TB 3.5" HDDs and these are cheap and available, but are they any good?

http://www.span.com/product_info.php?products_id=35366

Those appear to be SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives, meant to go into an InforTrend SAN storage device. They will not work on a standard desktop or NAS with SATA.

That particular drive appears to be manufactured by Hitachi.

Odds are, the drive carries the InforTrend brand, due to it having specific firmware for InforTrend SAN devices. DEC/Compaq/HP does the same thing as do other SAN vendors. They buy drives from different manufacturers, making small tweaks to the firmware to ensure RAID compatibility. Usually this is to equalize drive size down to the byte space available between various vendors. Would be a bad situation if a replacement 250GB (249,999,999,999 byte) drive from Vendor B was too small compared to the existing 250GB (250,000,000,000 byte) drives in production from Vendor A.

Thanks Tom, glad I asked. I've now ordered some 1.5TB seagate barracudas which I found elsewhere at the same price. Huge availability issues on HDDs at the moment, making a relatively easy buy quite complex.

Still a bit of fallout in the system from the flooding in Thailand last year. Interesting that this has caused some SAS drives to be near the pricing of SATA drives. Normally the price difference is significant.

Yeah, that's impacting a lot of tech now, including cloud services that need a ton of hard drives to store all this data we're trying to put online now.

Prices around here have come down considerably over the past month ($120/2TB). Not yet back to September/2011 levels ($80 for 2TB), but getting there.