On Monday June 30 2003 04:37 am, James Sparenberg wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-06-28 at 20:20, Brian Parish wrote:
> > I've seen a few recommendations for WD drives recently. Can
> > anyone say anything definitive about the error correction issue
> > that apparently applied to WD drives? There was a series of
> > threads on the Mandrake groups - probably a year back now - in
> > which some people including Civileme talked about WD drives
> > relying on W$ drivers to implement ECC
CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check), not ECC
> > and therefore being
> > subject to corruption when used with linux.
> >
> > If this has been fixed, or was a hideous slur on WD, or
> > whatever, it would be great to know. As it stands I am
> > reluctant to use them, but maybe I'm missing out on a great
> > product.
> >
> > TIA
> > Brian
>
> Not only is it not fixed... I personally feel it's gotten worse.
> I was forced to install during a recent install fest on a number
> of WD drives and to be honest not a one of them worked worth a
> dang. I could never get one to work reliably above UDMA2 (nor
> could winders, which is how we got them for free.) If all of
> those drives hadn't been donated I personally wouldn't have done
> anything but trash them.
>
> James
Brian, better than taking anecdotal opinions from various
Mandrake lists (BTW, I believe James' opinion is valid), a better
source than even civileme is the lkml (linux-kernel ml). WD's still
continue to be reported as problem drives due to lack of proper CRC
checking. Used with Linux the usual kernel guru's advice is to
never use them above udma2 (ata/33), or disable udma altogether for
WD drives. This will not alleviate the data corruption problems
WD's inflict when placed on the same ide channel with certain other
brand drives tho.
--
Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas
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