NO - it is not just RAID; I've recently had this disk problem with several new Seagate External drives, which I have always reformatted in HFS+ from the start. I have also been running Mavericks throughout this process and haven't made any major upgrades.
I have only come upon this thread by chance (through my efforts to troubleshoot said problem), which has taken me to address Seagate, and Micromat - who make TechTool Pro - who were concerned about the 'losing directory information', but did point me back to Apple - correctly.
I guess the issue has been addressed in a way by Apple, because there have been three new OS releases since Mavericks, and I trust this serious situation has been remedied in those…? But that doesn't help those of us who were reluctant to upgrade for various reasons - mine being other application compatibility - and sheer frustration with having to bend to each and every upgrade that comes out each time more frequently - and it always results in some major change of architecture somewhere. We end up spending more time troubleshooting these computer problems than using them productively for their rightful purpose…
I was actually wondering if the opposite is true: should I reformat these drives in a cross-compatible format such as FAT-32 or NTFS and use Paragon?? I really want to go back to Snow Leopard!