On Saturday, Jan 3, 2004, at 09:06 America/Denver, Thomas H. George wrote:
I just replaced a hard drive. Thinking this a routine choice I bought the one with a big rebate, namely Western Digital. I wasn.t too upset that the installation CD was only for Windows and Macintosh but I was shocked to find the following message at the bottom of the installation instructions:Operating Systems Supported WARNING!Using an operating system not listed below could result in data loss.followed by a list of Windows and Macintosh operating systems.If I had known this I would never have purchased the Western Digital drive and, needless to say, I will never purchase another. I proceeded to format it with ext2 partitions using my Debian CD's and have not noticed any problems. Why would they say such a thing? What should I buy next time?Tom
I wouldn't worry about it Tom. Sounds like a clueless person is in charge of paranoia at WD. I have WD, Maxtor, Seagate, and even a few (shudder...) Quantum drives in the server farms I've worked on and also here at the house. They all work fine.
It's just the idiot lawyers and project managers at WD wanting to have a disclaimer for no good reason. Maybe a good reason to not buy WD is that they are showing their ignorance of how their disks are used, after seeing that, but the drives themselves work fine with Linux or anything else I've ever tried them with.
As far as hardware-reliability goes, the Maxtor's fail quickly if not kept cool, Quantums fail way before their "time" and are the worst brand of drive I've ever encountered, the WD's last a nice long time, and the Seagate's are incredible... I have eight year old Seagate drives still spinning in various servers with zero problems. All of the above, the typical failure mode is the loss of the drive bearings, complete with plenty of warning as they start to "whine" prior to dying.
-- Nate Duehr, nate@natetech.com