Western Digital external drives

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 2013-03-15 at 06:55 -0400, Andrew Huys wrote:
> "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.

It might be that the WD drive I own will be a bad drive, it's just 2
weeks old, so I don't have experiences, but I can't confirm that it's
noisy. It's the first drive I own that is quasi _inaudible_ when awake
and I've got a very good hearing. It's 30 cm away from my right ear on a
wooden table, a very good resonator.

> Lesson learned?  
> -I'll stick to Seagate.  
> -Or Hitachi

Don't! Stay to exactly the models and revisions of Seagate and Hitachi
drives that you know as being good. I experienced Seagate/Maxtor and
several other drives, perhaps Hitachi too, I don't remember, as bad,
just my Samsung are very good. Even if you should order the same model,
you can't ensure to get the same revision. However, I don't clami that
Samsung in general is good, the drives I own are very good.

> 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...

I'm aware of all the tools, but that doesn't solve the issues caused by
a service that touches the drive and makes it spin up.

And don't confuse internal drives with external USB 2 drives.

Regards,
Ralf