See, and if you started most threads this way, it would clear up a lot of confusion! :D


Just remember, Ubuntu Goode.

http://multimedia.heraldinteractive....ff_27good1.jpg

Mac bad:

http://www.pyrusmalus.com/_resources...mac_header.png

within a year, the failure rate on the WD drives we sold at the computer store approached 100%. then, when i got RMA #'s, they shipped them back to me, without even opening the box. i never sold another one.

then there was the time i built a machine with a mirror set of WD drives. all the supplier i used had at the moment were WD drives. one failed within a week. then the other failed an hour after the first, meaning that they both failed within a week, and, despite a very good effort, all data was lost. luckily, the office wasn't yet up and running, so i was able to build a new mirror set, at home, and ship the drives for installation, which had removable bays. i used samsung drives.

samsung drives are not the fastest, but i rarely had one fail. i also like hitachi and maxtor.

then again, i am sure you are fine with the WD drive. ;)

I've got two WD drives that performed flawlessly for several years until lightning juiced the PC they were in sitting in a box at home... They are tiny and IDE or I would have used one of them....

Everyone has there preferences. Over the years, certain drives are on top. I have had few problems with WD drives, but that's not to say they don't fail as well. I had a Maxtor fail within month.

Lets not forget about the IBM Deathstar....

exceptions to the rule ;)

I've never had one fail. In fact, of all the drives I EVER owned only a single Maxtor died and that was only due to a power surge that toasted my whole pc.

The main HDD failure problem I had was the IBM click of death. Also a WDC drive failed on me, but that was after 4+ years in a TiVo, reading and writing practically 24/7.

there goes your chances of winning the lottery. :)

Maxtor are the worst. I work for a large storage company. Several years back we were using Maxtor drives. Out of over 200,000 drives we bought from them in a little over a year 11% were DOA (died in burn-in testing), and another 10% died in the first year. We switched to Seagate after that and we had under 1% failure in the first year. Huge difference!

Seagate bought Maxtor a few years ago. Put them out of their misery.

I have a decade of storage experience.

Don't mix experiences of old drives with new ones. Every generation has it's own idiosyncrasies.

For example, I had IBM GXP75 Deathstar die on me 2000...click of death. I bought new IBM drive 2001 (generation after) and it has been online and spinning (no spindown enabled) for 7.5 years in old mailserver. I kid you not...7.5 years online time, pulled from SMART registry.

Regarding new WD drives:

There are different drives depending on what they are used for. Desktop drives don't work well in RAID and vice versa. Consumer-grade WD's arent't meant to be run in RAID arrays. They have TLER disabled (assuming home desktop single-drive operation) and will go into deep-recovery mode on slightest hitch and get flagged as faulty by RAID card.

For example WD xxEADS (and some other WD drives) are made to be run as single drive. As soon as they get read-error (which happens now and then) they start "digging" in deep-recovery in order to recover data. RAID cards don't buy this and just flag them failed as soon as they time-out (usually around 10 secs). Even worse, WD Green drives are made to be "green" and don't work well with Linux. They park the heads after 8 seconds in order to save power. Linux doesn't give s**t about being green and tickles the drive every 20 secs or so, drive ends up parking/unparking heads every 20 secs and racks up heaps of LCC events in no time. They are specced for 300000 unparks, which can be reached as soon as 1 year. Paradoxally, WD thinks that Linux should be fixed (for accessing the drive) and not their firmware.

Those parameters can be altered with utilities WDIDLE3 and WDTLER but it will viod the warranty. So unless you run single desktop PC with one drive, avoid WD consumer discs.

More info:

Time-Limited Error Recovery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


To round it off: if you run RAID and want to be sure, use drives on list approved by manufacturer. They will usually cost more than same size consumer drives though. For pro stuff, it's FC or SAS that count's...with 5 years warranty. (but there are good SATA drives as well...just not as cheap as you are used to)

For Windows and Mac desktop and single drive only...use whatever you find best.


Regarding SSD's: there are intricate "technicalities" with SSD's. While two drives from different manufacturers might have same speed when empty, one will slow down to crawl after being used for a while and another won't. It has to do with "block erase" of flash memory.

Intel X25-M SSD's seem to be best for customer use right now. For server use, be prepared to pay triple price.

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Goran (beepbeep) spelled out what I didn't feel like typing... Good stuff. :) Thanks.

Got my mini running on Linux right now... Love this little thing.... Can't wait to get SL

I have SL, can't wait to find a MB combo that works for me.. :D

I got SL running on my Mini 10v yesterday, it's pretty damned nifty and I put the big Apple sticker from the OS package over the Dell logo. :D

I tried to upgrade to 10.6.2 using the "combo install package" on the Apple site and got denied. Going to have to try the online update....but I'm askeered to!

Check the boards before you do that.

Apple have been breaking the Atom support.

Theoretically it's "unbroken" now. But I suspect Apple sneaked another bomb in again.

I bought the SL DVD yesterday... Had issues with the pc's I had lying around. I was at Frys, saw an Intel D945GCLF2D Mainboard with Atom proc..

I can get the boot loader working and the SL dvd spins up, then it freezes. I suspect this dvd has the 10.6.2 kernel on it.

There are ways to get it to work, but I don't have a working Mac handy.

I think you can make a disc image from the CD that will boot from a thumb drive.

I think that is the method to use if you need to modify anything in the payload.