[ale] OT: WD "Advanced Format" and "Green Drives"

[William Fragakis]

Helpful advice from a newegg review. I've seen this elsewhere in their
reviews, too.

"Here's a suggestion for anyone buying a hard drive, go with FedEx, the
express saver is the cheapest. I know it cost more than UPS and Newegg's
"free shipping" isn't FedEx, but here's the deal: I have bought over 30
hard drives (Western Digital and Seagate) through Newegg in the past 2
years, 100% of the ones shipped FedEx are still running, 80% of the ones
shipped UPS were either DOA or failed within 6 months. UPS beats the
He11 out of their shipments, even their website states that every
package is subject to a 6 foot drop. Do the math, free shipping or
cheaper UPS shipping isn't free in the long run. I ship my non-fragile
items with the free shipping, but I do a separate order and use FedEx
for hard drives and Motherboards."

wf

On Fri, 2010-04-09 at 13:45 -0400, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> I would avoid drives with 4KiB physical blocks for a while longer
> unless you want to take extra care about alignment etc.
> 
> As an example parted only got alignment support for them in Dec. 2009
> (parted 2.0 or 2.1)
> 
> My preferred distro is OpenSuse they only got that version of parted
> into their factory distro source code last friday.  It is supposed to
> part of the "milestone 5" release they are doing over the weekend, but
> milestone 5 is effectively a alpha release of the distro.
> 
> So I would have to be using a alpha release of that distro to get true
> 4KiB partition alignment support.
> 
> And at this point no one has even reported testing the full alpha
> release against a 4 KiB drive.
> 
> There first released version with support will be 11.3 that comes out in July.
> 
> Greg
> 
> On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Brian Pitts <brian at polibyte.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm thinking about getting a large, slow hard drive [0] for backups and
> > media storage. I'll be putting it in a USB enclosure. Does anyone have
> > experience, good or ill, with the latest Western Digital drives that use
> > 4KiB blocks and "intellipark".
> >
> > [0] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136513
> >
> > --
> > All the best,
> > Brian Pitts
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> 
> 
>