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

[Brad Campbell]

Craig Ringer wrote:

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

I'll hook them up to a standard ata connector tonight and log the output for you.

> 
> 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.

I have seen more than my fair share of Seagates with blown logic boards so I tend to steer clear of 
them also.

I'm a little concerned about these WD drives as I have 5 from the same batch (I use them as scratch 
drives and Raid-0 replacements!) and 2 have failed in exactly the same way.
These drives are seeing heavy use, like thrashing madly for 40 hour stretches but they just should 
not die like they are.

I must say I'm loving the Maxtor Maxline-II drives at the moment. Just saving to go and buy another 
15 to set up in a Raid-6.

Brad