[ale] Anyone using a Western Digital external HD ?

[Ron Frazier]

JD,

My post on this topic at 2:42 AM today has much more detail on how I 
deal with hard drives. I recommend buying a bare internal hard drive 
with a 5 year warranty and putting it in an external case if you need 
external operation. I usually buy Seagate. I would not go for the 
shorter warranty drives. Nor would I go for a pre-encased drive like the 
MyBook since removing the drive from the case will probably void the 
warranty.

Sincerely,

Ron


On 11/17/2011 05:46 PM, JD wrote:
> I purchased a 2TB MyBook USB3 HDD a few days ago.  Connected it via rear-USB to
> my main storage server here, wiped the existing partitions and created an EXT4
> partition in sdh5.  Started a copy, this new drive is intended for backups only,
> and after 135GB, it stopped copying. Kicked off an rsync a few more times with
> similar results. Even provided a huge area for rsync scratch.
>
> The USB bus started kicking out errors - LOTS of errors.  umount and mount
> couldn't do anything with the mount point. It was ugly.  The entire system
> started getting slow. Other USB devices work well enough on this machine and
> were still working. Switched to a different USB port (front) and saw similar
> results after a reboot.
>
> Rebooted this morning and the HDD wasn't seen well enough to mount, but it was
> seen well enough to prevent the boot sequence from continuing.
>
> I expect to return the drive tomorrow.
>
> Would prefer an internal drive over an external, mainly due to the longer
> standard warranty periods, but the price diff is huge now.  (1 vs 3yrs) or (2 vs
> 5 yrs).  I need another HDD for backups and 2TB seemed like the sweet price
> point.  Should we have gotten the Seagate for $10 less with only a 1 yr warranty
> instead?
>
>
>
>
> On 11/17/2011 05:02 PM, Courtney Thomas wrote:
>    
>> Mike,
>>
>> Thanks for the reply.
>>
>> How do you install it and under which Linux flavor ?
>>
>> Courtney
>>
>> On 11/16/2011 11:00 AM, Michael H. Warfield wrote:
>>      
>>> On Wed, 2011-11-16 at 05:22 -0500, Courtney Thomas wrote:
>>>        
>>>> If yes, under what system and how should it be installed and used, please ?
>>>> I've been given one [500MB MyBook, USB&  Firewire capable] that the
>>>> former owner says will only intermittently shutdown or be recognized
>>>> by Windows Vista, so would like to use it myself if I can figure out
>>>> what's been the problem under winders.
>>>>          
>>> IIRC, some of those WD MyBooks had problems with the spindown logic a
>>> few years back.  I don't recall anything about Vista but Vista had its
>>> own sets of problems so all bets are off there.  I've also seen some
>>> comments about iMacs and the MyBooks.  I seem to recall some comment
>>> from back then that the USB interface would disconnect when the drive
>>> would spin down but, in retrospect, that really doesn't seen to make
>>> much sense to me now.  If you do a google search on "western digital my
>>> book linux spin down" you'll find lots of commentary on it with some
>>> suggesting to set the spindown time to fairly long values.
>>>
>>> I've got some 750's that have never given me a problem under Linux.  I
>>> guess I got lucky.  It was shortly after I bought those that I started
>>> hearing that some people where having problems.  Mine DON'T have the
>>> firewire port, though, so it may have been that particular model, which
>>> was slightly more expensive when I was looking at them side by side.  I
>>> bought these when Best Buy was clearing them out to make way for the
>>> newer models that included the firewire port.
>>>
>>> I would hook it up and give it a shot and see how it behaves.  If you
>>> need to, set the spindown timeout to a long value and see if that makes
>>> an impact.  If it's been given to you, I would guess you don't have
>>> anything to lose from playing with it and seeing how it acts.
>>>
>>>        

-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
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Ron Frazier

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