Western Digital external drives

[Andrew Huys]

/"Ok 1. Buy Seagate drives in future. Good guarantees and built 
properly. By comparison WD drives are made from sheep sh** and mud!"/

Agreed.  I've got a WD 1TB drive in the 2nd HDD bay on my Lenovo T 61p 
laptop, and a 120GB Seagate in the primary bay.  The Seagate is silent, 
spins up and down reliably, "soft parks" and is just generally a joy to 
use.  The WD on the other hand is loud, spins erratically, and spinning 
down?  DON'T LET IT!  If it does, try to access > wait about 30 seconds 
 > WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR > "Filesystem Remounted"...   If I unmount 
the drive, sometimes, it will continue to run at full speed for a few 
hours, for no apparent reason.

Lesson learned?
-I'll stick to Seagate.
-Or Hitachi (if you can find them).  In my previous laptop, an 
IBM/Lenovo T43p, I had a Hitachi Travelstar with the APS enabled (there 
is/was a pacckage in the repositories) and that was a wonderful setup.  
It would park the drive if the computer accelerometer detected that the 
computer was moving.  Saved my files a couple of times when I was doing 
mobile recording and people tripped on cables...

As far as working on drives goes, GPtd can do just about everything you 
need.
I would also reccamend gsmartcontrol (sudo apt-get install 
gsmartcontrol), a graphical SMART data reader.  Just helpful to check 
and see what's going on with the drive.  Also fun to check "new" HDD 
with.  My 1TB WD /out of the box/ came with 3 G-Sense errors...

~And

On 03/14/2013 11:20 PM, Anthony Hall wrote:
>
> Ok 1. Buy Seagate drives in future. Good guarantees and built 
> properly. By comparison WD drives are made from sheep sh** and mud!
>
> You can test your drive by setting it as a slave drive (secondary) 
> drive in your machine. It's easy enough to set it as such in the bios. 
> Then, open 'Gparted' and run a benchmark test. It comes packaged with 
> studio. If it's not working, do everything, format it, erase 
> partitions, change the filesystem to ext4....  You name it! If it's 
> bust what have you got to lose? Might as well learn how to use Gparted.
>
> I've never rescued a bust drive yet. I tend to find they are 
> mechanically sound or they are not.
>
> Have fun but avoid hammers... they are very bad for hard drives ;) p
>
> On Mar 14, 2013 3:29 PM, "Ralf Mardorf" <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net 
> <mailto:ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net>> wrote:
>
>     Hallo,
>
>     in the German WD forms I got a reply, with the claim, that once a WD
>     Elements is spin down, it will park, _not_ spin up again, if
>     there's no
>     access.
>
>     For my updated Quantal, 64-bit with current kernel lowlatency from the
>     repos and a self-build kernel-rt 3.6, running current Xfce 4 the drive
>     does spin down and up again and again even when _no_ partition is
>     mounted, I'm running a Xfce 4 session without an application launched,
>     while I don't use the computer.
>     So with completely no access by me,
>
>     - Quantal _does_ access the drive, even if no partition is mounted
>     - or I got a brand new drive that's broken and should make use of the
>       warranty
>
>     How can I find out, if there's something fishy with my Quantal or if
>     the drive is broken?
>
>     Any ideas?
>
>     Regards,
>     Ralf
>
>
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