[plug] WD drives coming formatted as NTFS?

[Paul]

FWIW, I think your approach is commendable.

BTW, over the last 12 months I had new disks both in static bags an in
those transparent plastic cases/boxes. I must admit that I've never
looked for pre-existing filesystems on any of them - I just low-level
format/surface check and then start using them. Maybe I ought to look
more carefully.

Paul


On Sun, 2009-10-25 at 13:18 +0800, Ari wrote:
> 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...
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