[plug] WD drives coming formatted as NTFS?

[Ari]

Ari wrote:
> Kevin Shackleton wrote:
>> Might not these drives have been recovered stock from a batch of drives
>> set up for PC installation that never made it in the run.  Therefore
>> they would have been bulk copied but never actually used.  They would
>> have been sold off cheap and presumably bought cheap, with free mounting
>> brackets.
>>
>> I don't see anything wrong with that, so long as there wasn't deceptive
>> practice.
>>
>> Kevin
>>
>>   
>
> There was nothing to mention that the drives were not absolutely brand 
> new. Certainly no mounting brackets. I thought it odd that they 
> weren't in static bags, but I've had some manufacturers do that in the 
> past with drives that were brand new. This is well known retailer with 
> a range of drives from a variety of manufacturers.
I've had a few private requests for the name of this company. I am going 
to wait until I hear back to from the owner who I have emailed. I'm 
pretty pissed at this point because of the amount of time I've lost and 
the extra two days of downtime, but just because an employee screwed up 
I want to give the owner a chance to make it right and provide an 
assurance that it won't happen again - to anyone. I think I'm being as 
fair in this. Please don't think I'm snubbing the requests for the name, 
I just want to give the owner a chance to fix things first. I think we'd 
all like that chance if we were in that situation.

That said, I've learned quite a lot about drives and accessing data 
contained on them. For example, smartmontools is installed by default in 
FC11 and the smartctl command (with the appropriate options) allows one 
to examine the information stored by the drive. For example, my 'new' 
drives have had double the number of power cycles as I have given them...