On Mon, 2003-06-30 at 07:45, Tom Brinkman wrote: > 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, There is a reason why they are the cheap drives. I've not got hard evidence on this but indications that the Winders solution to the WD problem is to do the crc's in software rather than in firmware. Which to me means a greater CPU load and lowered performance IMHO. I believe Tom's Hardware has also done some benchmarking on Drives in the last year that might add data to the pile. James
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