civileme wrote, back on Sun, 19 May 2002 12:26:32 -0800: > Firest of all, WD is made about as cheap as possible. It has a single > platter and two heads, which makes the track density about as high as > the technology will allow. Other manufactirers tend to use more > platters and more heads, and sometimes dedicate one head to clocking the > data on the others. > WD reps have stated unequivocally at several shows that they DO NOT > support linux at all, only Windows and Solaris. That tends to indicate > that there is something seriously out of spec with there stuff since > they are unwilling to risk broad scrutiny with highly optimized linux > drivers. It also suggests that they have submitted their own drivers to > those op systems which tend to cover deficiencies in hardware.
> My experience with WD drives includes a WD200AB which ran on a RedHat > system at a whopping 1.62Mb/s when set to UDMA66.. I tinkered with the > settings using hdparm and eventually settled on UDMA33 with a > performance increase to over 9M/s. > I use a WD64AA to reproduce disk errors and find workarounds for support > purposes. It does signal service. I can always count on it for > "Seems like memory missing as install crashes" > "hda: lost interrupt" > "0x51 {DriveReadySeekComplete}" > Type errors on a randomly occurring basis. I know if I can tweak the > chipset and the kernel to manage that drive, I can tell the customer > what to do to get running, besides swapping out his horrid disks. > WD has an extended track record of failures and bad drives. I once > called them about a faulty drive, and it was the smoothest sales > experience I EVER had. They obviously do not short their customer > relations department. But then that is spending money to do over the > job that wasn't done properly the first time, and seems to me to be a > scary mismanagement. Build it right the first time,,, An airline tha > has a VP in charge of lost luggage would scare me just as much. > Now, on to facts about testing by Mr. Linux-ide himself. > http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20000214_54.epl#2 Anyone know where the content of this article can be found? > Yes, it is not recent, but WD hasn't changed. They still have odd > timing and they still have a very bad workaround for leaving out the > hardware to do 57-byte CRCs and the result is a noise in transmission > from the computer becomes a permanent error on read-back. The blow-off > makes it look like the drive is faster but at the expense of a gamble on > data integrity. Anyone around computers for a while knows that if an > error has nonzero probability, it doesn't matter what the odds against > it are, it WILL occur, and the probability only tells you how often to > expect it. And the hardware/software implementation had better chack > for it and setup a recovery. And WD seems to rely on the low > probability, which is just how Andre Hedrick characterizes it. > And I am still seeing 8 times as many reports of problems with install > or stability from WD owners as from Seagate owners. I rarely see any > from Maxtor owners, and even the slew of reports lately from owners of > recent IBM disks who are running them 24/7 does not match the continured > high level of complaints (about our OS) from WD owners. -- ". . . . in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you . . . ." Matthew 7:12 NIV Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://members.ij.net/mrmazda/partitioningindex.html
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