I have built 4 linux servers with WD2002FYPS drives over the past 3 months, all using Areca 1680ix controllers, and they have not been having drives drop out of the arrays. I did not install any jumpers on the HDD's — they all are set to the default SATA300.Each server has 16 HDD's configured as RAID 6 with a hot spare. I have a Chenbro backplane (RM31616) connected to the Areca.By the way, the Areca 1680ix-16 has four (not three) internal SFF8087 connectors, and one external SFF-8088 cable. It takes just under 10 hours to initialize the RAID 6.
I found that it is highly beneficial to force the individual SFF-8088 cable write caches to "Enabled" with the Areca system menu (then reboot), otherwise the initialization would take days. With a battery backup, when the SFF-8088 cable write cache is set to auto, that corresponds to disabling the write cache, which is normally what you want, but during initialization of the array it is better to have it enabled temporarily.