Western Digital hard drives are garbage

On Thu, 19 May 2005 17:17:15 GMT, Lady Chatterly
wrote:

In article
Me wrote:

Yeah, I really need to set up RAIDs in these servers. Right now I've
got each server backing up it's important data files on other servers
hard drives via LAN. If one dies I won't lose the data, but I'll have
to set everything back up and reconfigure it all which is a PITA.

Those are up to the bone.

LADY!!!!!! Sup, little "bit"? :-)

Interesting, but I have to dissagree, I have used 80 Gb J-B's as
regularly as drinking coffee with no more trouble than with any other
brand, Maxtors are also OK, as are Seagate barracudas.

The 8 Mb J-B will be faster than the others, although there is a
"trick" that many don't know about the WD drive, REMOVE ALL DRIVE
JUMPERS when using them as a single master or they will simply refuse
to work or be found by any board.

Good chance is that you have bought them from the same place and got a
dodgy batch, as I did with 4 Tyan S2466 N-4M boards, they are meant to
be good boards, where the simple act of shutting them down would mean
they would not restart the next day, all went the same way, and all
bought from the same place.

Go figure that ? Same as all my Tyan / Intel boards, not a glitch
EVER !

Evil spirits perhaps.

In article et,
(Neill Massello) wrote:

Zed Pobre wrote:

I've previously had bad experiences with IBM drives, but I'm told that
limited to a single manufacturing batch, and they're much better than
I think. I wouldn't know, as I haven't bought those since then,
either.

The Deskstar 75GXP and 60GXP were disasters, but (AFAIK) the recent
models haven't had unusually high failure rates.

I've had a few Deskstar 75GXP and 120GXP drives die. The 75GXP drives
suffered from progressive failure, except for one that had a bad IDE
interface from the factory. A 120GXP warranty replacement died
completely when my mouse fell off my desk, swung on its cord, and hit my
computer. It's not even worth another warranty replacement. Rebuilding
a system sucks.

My photos are currently on a pair of Western Digital drives that have
been working very well. They weren't bothered a bit by the mouse
incident.

Kevin McMurtrie writes:

In article et,
(Neill Massello) wrote:

Zed Pobre wrote:

I've previously had bad experiences with IBM drives, but I'm told that
limited to a single manufacturing batch, and they're much better than
I think. I wouldn't know, as I haven't bought those since then,
either.

The Deskstar 75GXP and 60GXP were disasters, but (AFAIK) the recent
models haven't had unusually high failure rates.

I've had a few Deskstar 75GXP and 120GXP drives die. The 75GXP drives
suffered from progressive failure, except for one that had a bad IDE
interface from the factory. A 120GXP warranty replacement died
completely when my mouse fell off my desk, swung on its cord, and hit my
computer.

Being struck by a mouse should be well within the shock tolerance of a
hard drive.

My photos are currently on a pair of Western Digital drives that have
been working very well. They weren't bothered a bit by the mouse
incident.

My photos are on two raid-1 arrays in different countries, and on my
laptop. Can't be too careful with things you can't recreate.

--
Måns Rullgård

"Kevin McMurtrie" wrote in message
...
In article et,
(Neill Massello) wrote:

Zed Pobre wrote:

I've previously had bad experiences with IBM drives, but I'm told that
limited to a single manufacturing batch, and they're much better than
I think. I wouldn't know, as I haven't bought those since then,
either.

The Deskstar 75GXP and 60GXP were disasters, but (AFAIK) the recent
models haven't had unusually high failure rates.

I've had a few Deskstar 75GXP and 120GXP drives die. The 75GXP drives
suffered from progressive failure, except for one that had a bad IDE
interface from the factory. A 120GXP warranty replacement died
completely when my mouse fell off my desk, swung on its cord, and hit my
computer. It's not even worth another warranty replacement. Rebuilding
a system sucks.

My photos are currently on a pair of Western Digital drives that have
been working very well. They weren't bothered a bit by the mouse
incident.

I've had nothing but good performance and durability out of all the Western
Digital HD's I use (few 5, 8, 15, 40 and 80 gigs on multiple pc's). A
couple of the smaller ones are = 10 years, 8 gig is = 6, 15 = 5, all at
24/7 uptime (pc's on 24/7) and other than the odd reformat for OS upgrades,
primary/slave reasons etc., they've never even "hiccupped". Same period and
have had both Maxtor and Hitachi's fail.

I'm the same as pjp, I've not had any problems with WD drives, either.
Their Raptor drive also works very well for me.

On 31 May 2005 22:01:49 -0700, wrote:

I'm the same as pjp, I've not had any problems with WD drives, either.
Their Raptor drive also works very well for me.

I believe the enemy is heat. Those who have good luck with HDs manage
to keep theirs cool.

I asked WD tech support what they considered the safe operating
temperature for their drives and they replied that 15 - 55C. I have a
temp probe (SMART) on my WD SEs and they run no hotter than 40C when I
defrag them.

My case has places for 4 fans in the front and 2 of them are directly
in front of the internal 3.5" bays. That way you can blow air from an
80mm fan right over the disks.

I also have a Kingwin KF-23 removable bay with 3 fans - 1 in the bay
and 2 in the drawer. With the tray in the bay 24x7 the hottest I have
seen the disk get is around 40C. Uusally it rides around 37C when
Windows is idling.

I also have the Enermax 352 RAID/Backup unit with its 60mm fan. The
drives in there run about the same as in the other locations.

There is no excuse for frying a HD anymore.


--

Map of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy
http://home.houston.rr.com/rkba/vrwc.html

If you can read this, thank a teacher.
If you are reading it in English, thank an American soldier.

On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 12:17:17 GMT, (Bob)
wrote:

On 31 May 2005 22:01:49 -0700, wrote:

I'm the same as pjp, I've not had any problems with WD drives, either.
Their Raptor drive also works very well for me.

I believe the enemy is heat. Those who have good luck with HDs manage
to keep theirs cool.

I asked WD tech support what they considered the safe operating
temperature for their drives and they replied that 15 - 55C. I have a
temp probe (SMART) on my WD SEs and they run no hotter than 40C when I
defrag them.

My case has places for 4 fans in the front and 2 of them are directly
in front of the internal 3.5" bays. That way you can blow air from an
80mm fan right over the disks.

I also have a Kingwin KF-23 removable bay with 3 fans - 1 in the bay
and 2 in the drawer. With the tray in the bay 24x7 the hottest I have
seen the disk get is around 40C. Uusally it rides around 37C when
Windows is idling.

I also have the Enermax 352 RAID/Backup unit with its 60mm fan. The
drives in there run about the same as in the other locations.

There is no excuse for frying a HD anymore.


Nonsense. Drives kept far cooler than your removable bays
can manage and ran from very high-end power still fail.
Heat or power "can" easily damage drives but are most
definitely not the only causes.

In that regard, WD drives are a little worse than many as
their flipped-circuit-board design protects parts from
physical installation (scraping) damage better but also
reduce the airflow further to the PCB mounted parts.
Regardless, they do usually stay cool enough with moderate
airflow.