On Tuesday December 17 2002 03:01 am, Jonathan Dlouhy wrote: > On Monday 16 December 2002 12:47 pm, Tom Brinkman wrote:
> > Civileme reported that WD's no longer supported CRC checking > > other that in Windoze. I believe he pronounced them as > > Win-harddrives. > > > > As an old timey overclocker, we clockers learned to quit usin > > Western Digital HDD's circa summer 1998. Before that they had a > > reputation for 'takes a lickin, keeps on tickin' among oc'rs. > > The issue remains the same, WD's went from being some of the best > > on an off-spec PCI bus (33.3mhz) ... to the worst. > > > > Civileme, as I relate to his past reports, said it was due to > > CRC short cuts. To save a few $$'s, WD transfered this from > > firmware to software. He also reported that WD's response to him > > was that their drives were not supported under Linux, only Winsux > > and Solaris by NDA and licensing agreements. > > This topic has been covered extensively in the past. I sent a query > to Western Digital regarding this issue of non-support. Here is > their response: > > > Response (Barb G) - 07/23/2002 07:58 AM > Greetings Jonathan, > Thank you for your email. > We have no issues with Western Digital drives being installed with > Linux or Unix. If you have more detailed information on specific > issues, I would be happy to address them. Or, if you can provide > the web site where these issues are being discussed we can address > them to the customer. If your friends are having issues with a > drive they should be contacting our technical support desk, or test > the drive with our utilities. We do not warranty a drive based on > the operating system used. Western Digital will honor the warranty > on any drive in the event of a drive failure, as long as the drive > is in warranty. If the drive carrys no warranty, or the warranty > has expired, we cannot replace the drive. > If I can be of further assistance, please let me know. > > Seems clear as far as WD is concerned. Personally, I have used > their drives for many years with no problems at all. I currently > have two 40 GIG, a 6 GIG and a 10 GIG WD drive. Also, a Seagate 40 > GIG drive, which also works well but has always been very noisy. > All Maxtor drives I have tried in the past have failed the first > day I used them, all with unrecoverable bad sectors. > > Cheers, All that says is they'll replace it while still under warranty ... which they're legally obligated to do anyhow (1 year?). A better source of realistic appraisal is the lkml, or Google, or real users. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=western+digital+CRC+check&btnG=Google+Search http:[EMAIL PROTECTED] You may or may not remember the events of august 1998. WD had a RMA rate that rivals the one Fujitsu is now experiencing. The difference could be that at least Fujitsu is now offering, according to news reports, to RMA drives that have expired warranties, even 3 years, even other vendor OEM system's they have no warranty exposure to. It appears from your quoted email response that WD isn't willing in this regard. If WD had to replace all their linux use drives ... what would that be 2 maybe 3% ? Fujitsu is potentially lookin at 30 to 50%. Gettin back to 1998. The perception then was that WD's were failin on CRC. It was first noticed by overclockers (usin other than the standard 33.3mhz PCI bus). At the time, IBM, Quantum, and specially WD drives were favored by oc'rs as they best tolerated an out of spec (call it oc'd if you must, but that's innaccurate) PCI bus speed. I had pre '98 WD drives myself, all on off spec PCI. The popular test then was to zip up about 600mb's, and then unzip. The files with summer and later '98 WD drives, all of a sudden, were often corrupt. The zip CRC check failed. Post 8/98 WD's immediately went to the bottom of the barrel along with Maxtor's and Seagate's as drives to be avoided by oc'rs. There seemed to be a stark change in WD drives. Later it became an issue on OS's other than W9.x. Seems the CRC checks were removed from the WD drives firmware, to be taken care of within software by the OS, assumed to be windoze (search the lkml). It wasn't till the linux kernel people exposed this that WD admitted it ... sort'a kind'a. Bottom line is hardware is a moving target, always has been. Unfortunately, specially with other than with M$, it's a downhill slide towards Junkyard Wars. Maxtor seems to be the safest bet right now, by February it could be Tonka Toys makes the better one ... as long as you have a WinXP+SP2 install CD for it ;> -- Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas
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