I am looking to set up a RAID mass storage array, and have been reading about how large disk sizes are jeopardising rebuild because of the time required to execute a full rebuild and the chance of failure in the process. Research suggests the knee-point for RAID reliability is at about 1TB per drive for an 'acceptable' security of all data.

I am therefore looking to set up a system with several 1TB drives and am looking at the Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 drive. Looking at its [spec sheet](http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/docs/manual/desktop/Barracuda%207200.14/100686584.pdf) however, the 1TB drive is simply one third of a 3TB drive inside, i.e. one platter per TB, three in total for the 3TB, one platter for the 1TB. It seems like a 3TB drive is just three 1TB drives in the same space.

Given all that, is it possible to 'see' a 3TB drive as 3 1TB drives, one per platter, and having them fail per-platter rather than per disk. It seems this would either be easy, just choose the right cylinder/head/sector set for each platter, or impossible because the disk hardware abstracts these details away from the OS. Of course if the controller board fails, then that amounts to three disks going out which is bad, but in certain use cases doesn't make it impossible to use effectively.

**Edit:** I am discussing RAID 5 (or 6) with the parity.