VanLUG Email Archive
> Clemmitt Sigler wrote:
> >
> > Hi everybody,
> > The reason I'm posting is to find out if my experiences are typical.
> > I have 3 WD hard drives and now two of them have had to be replaced
> > over the last two years. Does Western Digital really suck? Or is
> > it all IDE hard drives?
> >
> I've had 2 WD drives in our webserver for the last 3 years. No probs
> w AC21000 and AC21600. Slackware 2.2, -> tons of incrementals
> ending on V 2.0.34, libc5.4.xx something.
>
> We have 10 or so boxes and have never lost a HD running linux in 3
> years.
> We used to run SCO on one box, and we lost an old Quantum SCSI drive
> about a
> year ago. We replaced the drive and (wisely) upgraded to Linux. We
> were frustrated with a 5 user license on SCO.
>
> Running '95 & NT.... different story.
>
A company I did some consultation for bought a wad of the 3mb WD drives (I
don't remember the designation... 'caviar' pops into mind but that could be
wrong). Over the span of 4 or 5 months we lost half of them, one at a time,
due to what appeared to be heat-related problems. Amongst the symptoms were
very loud operating noise, constant retraining (that
*CLICK!*chuggachuggachugga* thing the drive does when first turning on, and
many drives do as part of internal adjustments for heat or spinrate), slow
operation and trouble identifying on boot. AFAIK they've all been replaced
now.
The real bitch was not so much that the drives died (hassle enough, but
work-aroundable) as the fact that most of the machines had been packed up and
shipped off to a tier 1 provider in San Jose. Fixing required putting OS
(linux) on a bunch of replacement drives, sending them south and getting
someone local to do the swap. Haven't had a problem since (We used a
combination of Quantum and Fujitsu 4gb drives).
Could be we got a hold of a bad batch (they were purchased in a bundle and
the serial numbers were relatively close together) but I can pretty much
guarantee that this client won't be buying WD again for a while.
--
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| Rick Franchuk - TranSpecT Consulting |
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