Comments

• dyfet

  2010-08-07 14:30:32

  I have one "current" western digital SATA drive. It is really a crappy drive, as when it benchmarks (Ubuntu disk utilities) there are places where performance drops to the floor faster than a stock market decline, and sure enough during booting, if some unfortunate file happened to be in one of those spots, it's slow. I retired the drive quickly as I had no tools to do a true low level format. It is not the first time I have had problems with quality with their products, either, though at least in older generation drives you could force such a media reformat. So it may not just be DRM, but also poor quality products, that may plague this company and offer reasons to avoid it.

• williami

  2010-08-07 17:55:55

  Damn, I was using Western Digital for my past few hard drive purchases... They made some pretty decent drives, but after hearing this, I think I'll go with Samsung for my hard drive needs, they have affordable hard drives and they work very well in RAID setups.
  
  By the way, I've always avoided Seagate, after my first hard drive with them killed my old Emachine, and nearly killed my machine.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-08-07 18:13:37

  Samsung sold Linux down the river though. It's one of the few companies which we boycott to defend the freedom of Linux (the whole 'patent issue').

• williami

  2010-08-07 18:27:21

  Well, other than Samsung, there's a Hitachi drive that looks very good:
  
  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145287
  
  It seems pretty good because of the price and generally good reviews...

• dyfet

  2010-08-07 18:29:57

  I currently have a Hitachi drive I am very happy with. It replaced that wd one I noted earlier :).

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-08-07 18:47:17

  I had an Hitachi HDD in my laptop and it didn't last.

• twitter

  2010-08-08 00:39:47

  These issues mostly apply to Wester Digital's non free software which they must provide to Windows users because Windows lacks sharing and diagnostic tools. I have bought, for lack of options, several WD external drives and have happily formatted them with ext3 and used them to share files across networks with them. I'm not aware of WD's level of cooperation when it comes to releasing specs or following standards. These are the things needed to make WD drives work with the free software tools that come with every GNU/Linux distribution. I'm also not aware of how badly they are extorted by Microsoft to cripple their drives with FAT and NTFS. More troubling would be DRM and data retention baked into the controller, issues I'm not aware of. People worried about that should run whole drive encryption, to feed it garbage, and should never use non free software like WD's tools.
  
  These are issues that The Register should have followed up with but did not. The most harmful thing WD or any other drive maker is to deviate from published specs in a way that would break GNU/Linux systems. It is bad that they did not say that free software tools would do the job just as well as their own, but we can't judge them by what Microsoft friendlies at The Register have to say. The Register should have tried out the monitoring tools themselves. I've never bothered because I'm not so picky and have not had any real problems.