This is a line I practice my recital of every day (I'm not really a
tech support guy, but I seem to end up doing a lot) -
WD Hard drives work slightly differently from those from other
manufacturers in that they have two different master jumper settings,
one for master w/slave and one for master as a single drive. Most IDE
controllers don't care, but some are very picky and hang the drive
initialization indefinitely waiting for the second drive (when there
isn't one) on the chain if this is set incorrectly. These seems to
happen a lot with add-on PCI cards and external firewire/usb bays. A
quick look at this PDF file should help you establish whether you
have it set correctly:
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/library/eide/2579-001037.pdf
To be fair to the people who complain about their drives not working,
I don't think WD make this clear enough themselves, but that's
certainly not a reason to suggest they might be bad drives.
Jason Mayfield-Lewis
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
If freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.
On 19 Jan 2006, at 1:01 PM, Neil Hughes wrote:
On 16/1/06 23:33, Mark Benson wrote:
Western Digital have never curried much favour with me. Their
drives have always been 'so-so'.
I've never had a reliability or performance problem with them, but
sometimes they just don't seem to play well.
I bought a Sonnet ATA/133 card for my B&W lately along with a 120GB
WD and the card won't recognize it, nor an old 5400rpm 20GB WD.
Both work with the motherboard ATA/33. A Seagate 80GB 7200 works
fine both on and off the card. Checking on xlr8yourmac.com recently
I discovered quite a few references to similar problems.
One day I'll try banging the WD and Sonnets' heads together again,
though at the moment the WD is just used for serving the network so
drive capacity is more important than speed.
Neil
(hopefully this won't appear twice on the list...I tried sending it
yesterday and it bounced due to a 'quota reached" error)
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