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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