On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 9:27 AM, David Lum <[email protected]> wrote: > IS there anything special about Dell-supplied SATA drives?
Define "special". The HDA (hard disk assembly) and PCB (printed circuit board) are almost certainly the same as you would get if you bought a similar spec'ed drive from Wal-Mart. Some Dell drives have firmware which identifies themselves as "Dell", thus allowing them to work with Dell RAID controllers which refuse anything else. Some "enterprise" hard disk drives have tweaked firmware, supposedly to "optimize" them for "enterprise usage". Exactly how much, if any, benefit there is to such tweaks is a subject of considerable debate. Firmware tweaks *can* make a difference. Examples: One of the reported problems in the infamous IBM "DeathStar" debacle was that the drives would idle the heads in a single track. Under typical home luser usage patterns, that wasn't a problem. For a PC left on all the time but largely idle, though, it could lead to wear on that one track. The fix was to tweak the firmware to occasionally move the actuator arm, even when idle. Some HDD models are marked for "media" use, like in DVRs. What they do is tweak the firmware to quickly give up on a read/write error. Typical hard drives will keep retrying, often for several seconds. For a Word document, that's what you want, but for streaming media, it's more important to keep the stream streaming. A single lost block will be a barely noticeable glitch in the audio or picture. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
