fozzyfozborne your post is quite flawed.
First, eco drives do not spin down. They're running at a constant 5400 RPM.
Second, this unit probably only has 1 controller. This controller offers possibilities beyond what would make sense with in a controller with only 2 sata connections, ie raid-5, 6, 5E.
Third, gigabit is not limited to 100 MBps, but 125MBps in theory, and in reality closer to 115MBps depending on the quality of your network equipment.
Fourth, the likelyhood of a drive working perfectly forever, is, and always will be, equal to zero. All drives will fail, eventually. The best thing you can do, is to minimize the probability of unrecoverable dataloss and, if it is important, maximize data availability, in which case more drives is often better than fewer drives, if the appropriate raid levels are used.
Cost of purchase is higher, cost of ownership is lower - when you factor in the time/money spend on data recovery/loss of data.