[ale] Seagate's DB35 DVR drives don't work with PCs

[James P. Kinney III]

On Wed, 2007-11-07 at 23:01 -0500, Chris Woodfield wrote:
> Hey, this is more of a heads-up and a bit of a "WTF?" than an actual  
> question:
> 
> newegg.com has an OEM Seagate DB35 series 32G drive in stock for $70  
> each. These are drives that are supposedly "designed for DVRs"  
> according to the product page.
> 
> http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822148287
> 
> What the page (or seagate's own product page) doesn't tell you is that  
> these drives do not appear to work at all in standard PCs. In my case,  
> the BIOS recognized the drive, but it never became available to the  
> Linux kernel. Looking at the product reviews on the page I'm not the  
> only one who's run into this.
> 
> Which brings the question: what is so different about these drives  
> that they work in DVRs but not in PCs? From what I've found via google  
> one feature of these drives is that they spin up slower than other  
> drives, avoiding a large power draw at startup. Could this be causing  
> an issue?
> 
> Anyone have any more insight into this?

Seagate claims this is a perpendicular recording drive. But that aspect
should not appear at theOS layer unless something is really weird. The
blurb about "handles 10 simultaneous video streams" is quite curious.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=b3327ea70fafd010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&locale=en-US
> 
> -C
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> 
-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part