[plug] Ext USB2 HD adapter vs Ext IEEE 1394

[Craig Ringer]

On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 20:27, Brad Campbell wrote:

> I spent a large sum of cash for new hard disk controllers, interfaces and lots of other bits because 
> my WD2000JB drives kept locking up intermittently. Silly me, I thought it was anything other than 
> the drives. Looks like I fell foul of the JB series RAID bug. All my disks were made early March 
> last year and they only locked up when sitting in a RAID-5. <Sigh> If I had found the errata from WD 
> earlier it might have saved me some cash.

Indeed; they released a firmware fix quite some time ago. I ended up
trying a beta - can you say desparate? I was running them in RAID 5 and
while I did have problems, it turned out to be because the disks
physcially died - not because of the issue with "desktop optimized"
firmware and RAID.

The JB really has had a bad run, between that bad batch of disks (that I
bought something like 5 of) and the RAID firmware bug. I have recently
heard that it /was/ a bad batch, BTW - it wasn't just me having them die
like flies, though it was a rather short run of bad disks. Unlike, say,
the DeathStar series.

> Oh and while I'm here. Those Addonics SATA enclosures arrived. Cheap plastic, but reasonably well 
> built and they work well. The inbuilt cooling fan actually works well, unlike the stupid axial fans 
> that come with vipower units.

Good to hear.

Craig Ringer