[ale] OT: WD "Advanced Format" and "Green Drives"

[Jim Kinney]

I did a wiring project at DHL some time back. I observed their handling crew
would throw the boxes tagged "fragile" _harder_ than the others that were
not marked. If they heard tinkeling sounds ofterwards it was a source of
much hilarity.

FedEx drove a forklift fork through a server case I shipped out. When it was
delivered, they positioned the boxes to hide the damage and ran back to the
truck. 2 layers of 300lb cardboard, 4 inches of polystyrene foam, another
layer of 200lb cardboard and the metal case side all had a gash 5 inches
wide and 1/2 inch tall. Mobo was dead as was one cpu and 2 out the 6 DIMMs.

I have since designed a hard-sided server shipping case with internal shock
mounts that should let a server survive a 6 foot drop.

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 3:05 PM, William Fragakis <william at fragakis.com>wrote:

> Helpful advice from a newegg review. I've seen this elsewhere in their
> reviews, too.
>
> "Here's a suggestion for anyone buying a hard drive, go with FedEx, the
> express saver is the cheapest. I know it cost more than UPS and Newegg's
> "free shipping" isn't FedEx, but here's the deal: I have bought over 30
> hard drives (Western Digital and Seagate) through Newegg in the past 2
> years, 100% of the ones shipped FedEx are still running, 80% of the ones
> shipped UPS were either DOA or failed within 6 months. UPS beats the
> He11 out of their shipments, even their website states that every
> package is subject to a 6 foot drop. Do the math, free shipping or
> cheaper UPS shipping isn't free in the long run. I ship my non-fragile
> items with the free shipping, but I do a separate order and use FedEx
> for hard drives and Motherboards."
>
> wf
>
> On Fri, 2010-04-09 at 13:45 -0400, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> > I would avoid drives with 4KiB physical blocks for a while longer
> > unless you want to take extra care about alignment etc.
> >
> > As an example parted only got alignment support for them in Dec. 2009
> > (parted 2.0 or 2.1)
> >
> > My preferred distro is OpenSuse they only got that version of parted
> > into their factory distro source code last friday.  It is supposed to
> > part of the "milestone 5" release they are doing over the weekend, but
> > milestone 5 is effectively a alpha release of the distro.
> >
> > So I would have to be using a alpha release of that distro to get true
> > 4KiB partition alignment support.
> >
> > And at this point no one has even reported testing the full alpha
> > release against a 4 KiB drive.
> >
> > There first released version with support will be 11.3 that comes out in
> July.
> >
> > Greg
> >
> > On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Brian Pitts <brian at polibyte.com> wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I'm thinking about getting a large, slow hard drive [0] for backups and
> > > media storage. I'll be putting it in a USB enclosure. Does anyone have
> > > experience, good or ill, with the latest Western Digital drives that
> use
> > > 4KiB blocks and "intellipark".
> > >
> > > [0] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136513
> > >
> > > --
> > > All the best,
> > > Brian Pitts
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> >
> >
> >
>
>
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness
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