Hi Felix
  Once again sorry for top-post but it seems to make sense for this post. 
The blow mentioned "data" is quite old, applying to drives under
3Gigabytes total capacity and the EIDE thing is just a convention to keep
from confusing with SATA, since they do court considerable of the hobbyist,
DIY, and casual user market, many of whom would find PATA vs/ SATA
confusing.  I have been running various distros of Linux since 1996 and
many of them on WD drives.  All hardware manufacturers. even AMD and now
even stodgy old Intel, have, over the past 5 or 7 years, embraced the
"enthusiast", "performance", "gamer" etc
markets which has supported advanced features of quality and performance
all across the board from mobos, thru the obvious video cards and hard
drives, to now even include nics (witness the "Killer NIC" . 
Along this line WD has enjoyed top honors for building their Raptor models
using SCSI hardware, 5 year warranty, and extreme performance.  Despite low
capacities they are the fa
vorite choice on gaming/performance PC's even on PCs costing in excess of
$5000.00 US, such as Alienware, Dell's performance line, etc etc.  While
this is an isolated model, it does reflect a company wide commitment to
quality and performance, or perhaps more exactly, to a an ever changing
market base which has of late become substantially more sophisticated and
willing to spend big bucks for quality.  Can you imagine people, even
gamers, spending upwards of $500-$1000 just on *videocards* even 5 years
ago?  It is commonplace today which reflects how this market has changed. 
Companies that wish to survive and/or flourish must needs change with it. 
WD has not only survived but flourished.

  I have no affiliation with any PC or hardware company of any kind.  I am
just a happy user and one who has witnessed flame wars on the internet over
hard drive condemnation and found that *every* manufacturer is someone's
enemy.  It's just human nature to attempt to avoid being burned twice
through simplification.

Jimmy

PS  Incidentally, I have several Seagate drives presently and have owned
many over the years and find them to be of excellent quality, for the most
part (there were a few models -especially 10K rpm units- that had problems,
but no more or less than industry average).  I also still have working IBM
drives (including oddly enough a 20G 75GXP) and even a Fujitsu that by it's
10G size should tell you it's age.  I have read that though Hitachi started
out badly, they have improved.  That's enough for me to avoid them for a
few years or so.
 
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Felix Miata 
> On 2007/01/18 06:49 (GMT) rallee2{at}comcast.net apparently typed:
> 
> >   Western digital can hardly be faulted as a company since they
have sold so 
> many more drives than most other companies and still maintained failure rates 
> well under 1 percent.  They are acclaimed by every magazine and hardware website
> 
> Not every. Most magazine and hardware websites focus exclusively on M$.
> Have you checked Linux web sites?
> 
> Traditionally, WD drives conform to a superset of the ATA specs. That
> means they do/don't do things that are not in the standard ATA spec. WD
> calls (is that called, as in no longer?) their drives EIDE, while no
> other manufacturer calls/called their drives EIDE.
> 
> WD supplies M$ with special (proprietary) driver workarounds for their
> junk (non-spec compliant) firmware.
> 
> A sampling of the WD track record on Linux can be found at:
> http://archives.mandrivalinux.com/expert/2002-05/msg00948.php
> http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2000-February/000211.html
> http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Ultra-DMA.html#ss9.1
> 
> Whether all the above still applies to current products I have no idea,
> but I find Seagate's customer service and 5 year warranty compelling
> enough reason not to touch WD with my money.
> -- 
> "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."
> 						John 10:10 NIV
> 
>  Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409
> 
> Felix Miata  ***  http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



 
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