Originally posted by: tedinde
Are these drives the most reliable ATA drives available now? I am looking for a replacement for a failed WD SE.
I've probably RMA'd 6 WD's in the last 3 months, If any of you have noticed the Houseing on the new SE's seems thinner, and the drives are lighter?? And running HD tach, they seem to be slower than the SE's made a year ago. The new Maxtors I've tested are almost 5-8% faster.
Maxtor or Seagate for me now. I dont want to see another WD!!!! I got one back from a RMA 3 days ago. Put it in and the dam thing was clicking from the door!!!!
Yeah, the drives' housing seems to be of lighter weight, and cheaper build quality. As far as HDTach numbers, it depends on the overall drive size, and the size of the platters than they were made with. My 80GB WD JB is made with a single 80GB platter, and my 160GB WD JB is a two, or maybe actually even three, platter model. It certainly isn't 80GB/platter, and it's slower than the 80GB one in terms of transfer rates. But if it's not two 80GB platters, then it must be three platters of some smaller size, I guess. I've also noticed that it vibrates a disturbing amount, even though I have it securely mounted to the case. It's at the bottom of a stack of (right now, four) HDs. The 160GB also did NOT include a temp-sensor built-in, which I find quite strange. I thought that all new HDs had that feature.
I'm more concerned with several "spikes" on the HDTach graph, and issues with my computer briefly freezing up occasionally. I have all of my drives on a Promise Ultra100 TX2 controller. I used to have them on an Ultra66 before, but same issues. I put in the 160GB recently, but it too shows the few "spikes". I fear that the drive that I purchased new, has some defects already somehow. I also get entries in the system event log, that correspond to the times and HDs being tested by HDTach. Yet, I DONT get SMART "raw read error rate" or "Ultra CRC error rate" numbers from my SMART-reporting utility under W2K. They always show zero.
In the past, I actually did have some bad sectors develop on the 80GB, and when those happened, I got numbers in SMART for "pending sector re-allocation", and after they were re-mapped (due to a write to those sectors), I got numbers in the "re-allocated sector count" and "re-allocation event count" SMART raw values. I could also audibly hear the HD's re-trying to read those sectors. I DON'T hear read retries coming from the HD that correspond to the HDTach spikes.
I'm wondering if the HDTach spikes, are coming from the infamous "WD timeout" aka "WD RAID patch" bug issue. I've tried running WD's patch util, and it always tells me that my drives don't need the patch, even though both seem to fall within the range affected units.
I'm currently interested in finding someone's system event log entries, that would correspond to symptoms of this "WD timeout bug", so I can perhaps correlate my findings, and decide if my HDs are actually having physical issues, or if it's some sort of firmware anomoly.
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