[plug] CD/DVD recovery and rant on WD Drives

[Craig Ringer]

Brad Campbell wrote:

> I have 2 WD2000's in a Raid-0 as my nfsroot for another machine and high 
> speed scratch for video processing, this is the second one to die in as 
> many weeks. Worse still, I purchased them in AUS before I left and WD 
> will not RMA a drive in the Middle East. I have to go and argue with the 
> WD agent who is not interested coz I'm not going to buy 200 drives from 
> him.
> PAH. Last WD drives I buy.

Heh. I've had excellent experience with AMD's warranty people - and I've 
had a /lot/ of experience with them, too. In a way, this argues well for 
your point ;-)

> They have 2x80mm fans behind them and 2x92mm fans in front of them. They 
> run cool and have been treated well. These were the same drives that had 
> that bloody firmware bug causing them to drop out of raid arrays.

Yeah, that was lovely. I had a batch of drives with that problem when I 
first built this machine - I thought that might've been the problem with 
the way it's RAID arrays kept on dying. Nope ; it turned out I had a 
mostly-DOA RAID card (rather the worst kind) and a bad batch of WD disks.

> Run a SMART check on it and it simply runs around in circles screaming 
> "Fire! Fire!". Disk is toast :p(

Any chance of seeing the 'smartctl -a /dev/$DEVICE' output? I'm 
interested in seeing exactly what went wrong.

> More Maxtors for this bunny. (which is odd in itself as 2 years ago I 
> would not have even sniffed in their general direction)

I've found them and Seagate fairly reliable. I would've put my issues 
with WD down to simply buying more WD drives until recently, but my last 
experience is just too much (2 250GB disks out of a batch of 5 dying 
within a couple of weeks - the same way, on almost the same LBA sector). 
No more WD for me for a while.

--
Craig Ringer