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February 10, 2006
I hate western digital drives
Have I ever mentioned how much I hate western digital drives?
They just do not play nice, nor do they last.
When they fail, it's usually without warning.. Forget about S.M.A.R.T. detection.
Usually they just come up and knock because they can not seek to track 0.
So, breaking my usual "refrain from western digital behaviour", I recenlt broke down and purchased a couple of P-ATA 320GB ide's for Hercules (My dual XEON workstation).
First off they are much slower (half the cache).
Second I've quickly discovered WD does not play nice with Maxtor on the same cable.
I had to make the WD drive the master of the cable.
But now I'm having trouble every night when my backup executes.
I surmise if WD drives are the only thing on the bus, they are fine.
After all the radiobot machine has been up and running for years without incident.
So today I'll take the plunge and pick up a pair of SATA 500GB Maxtors.
And soon I hope to implement a new machine on my network..
geekly named "overlord" who will be my network monitor and backup server.
He'll be a pretty expensive machine, yet he's designed to fit in a small area and use very little power.
Take a peek here http://www.cappuccinopc.com/cubemini-673.asp
I actually purchased it from here http://www.bwi.com/prod/363682 because it is out of state.
Sure I'll pay shipping, then again, I won't be paying over $50.00 in sales tax + the shipping.
The CPU will be pretty dam expensive on it's own!!!
Cute lil guy eh?
Something about these ITX machines has been intriging me in the past few weeks.
My goal has been the hardware sweep.
Out with the old, in with the new...
But watch out for power, heat and size.
fun fun fun!
Posted by Me on February 10, 2006 09:44 AM
Comments
Also, a shame about the Western Digitals. You make a good point about the apparent incompatibility with other devices. I have dual WD1200JB's in my PC right now, and while they are the most silent drives I've ever owned, they do not seem to like being separated, or on the same IDE cable with other drives. When I tried rearranging things inside my PC, the drives wouldn't even post. It was the oddest thing. And yes, I did have a spontaneous crash on one of the drives, much like what happened with the WD600 that precipitated me buying these dual drives. Hmmm... One of the big advantages of the WD's is measured performance, heat dissipation, and noise levels. The WD1200JB's on up have excellent ratings all over the web for these things. Perhaps reliability measurements have been ignored. hmmm.
Here's hoping I don't run into too many issues when I yank one of these puppies out of my PC to drop into the ReplayTV. *frets*
Yeah, I don't like Western Digital much, give me Seagate anyday...that five year warranty is SWEET! The old school WD drives seemed to be fine, but the latest ones are crap, I just stay away altogether now.
> Pentium-M's for servers, huh? How much are you sacrificing in performance vs. the power savings?
For what I'm doing with it, not much actually.
as a backup server, i.e. a server I spawn backups onto over the network it could be a PIII and would still perform very well.
For netsaint/nagios montioring a PIII also performs well.
So a pentium-M at 2GHZ with a 2MB cache will have the performance availability of a 3GHZ P4 when it counts and then slow down to around 1ghz when nothing is happening. I imagine this will run between 50 and 150 watts depending on off peak/on peak usage. In this case, this is exactly what I wanted. I actually planned to use a SUMICOM 620 and use wake on lan to wake it up, then shut it off. I think this machine will be usefull for my other services. I.E. DNS caching, Squid Proxy, network monitor, Statistics monitor and SNORT intrusion detection. I also plan to set up some proxy's on it to protect my network better.
> If you were to add more of these puppies to get the equivalent performance of a dual Xeon, would you still be saving on power?
Not sure I understand that. My goal is to offload redundant services so my dual xeon does not run them and I have more cycles for vmware machines.
> Or does the PCI Express slot handle old-school PCI cards?
PCI-Express and standard PCI are not compatible (from what my research reveals)
> Too bad that it doesn't have a PCI slot, or it would make a FANTASTIC all-in-one MythTV box.
There are always the USB solutions.
From what I was told, they work fine.
*blink* DUAL Gigabit!? Wow!
Pentium-M's for servers, huh? How much are you sacrificing in performance vs. the power savings? If you were to add more of these puppies to get the equivalent performance of a dual Xeon, would you still be saving on power?
That's definitely intriguing, though! Too bad that it doesn't have a PCI slot, or it would make a FANTASTIC all-in-one MythTV box. Or does the PCI Express slot handle old-school PCI cards? (I'm still stuck in AGP Land). Slick, man.