Sunday, January 25
Western Digital, You Dickheads!
Okay, it's not as bad as Seagate's brick-in-a-box trick, but it's plenty annoying.
Western Digital have three lines of desktop drives: Black, the performance model; Blue, the everday model; and Green, the low-power model.
The Green range run at 5400RPM.
Western Digital not only do not advertise this fact, they go to great lengths to hide it. The speed of the Green range of drives is not stated anywhere on their website.
That leads to retailers assuming that the drives are, in fact, 7200RPM.
That leads to people buying them as replacements for actual 7200RPM drives, installing them, building them into RAID arrays, and then having to manually unpick their whole filesystem/logical volume/volume group/physical volume/RAID volume structure so that the 5400RPM drive isn't mirrored with the 7200RPM drive for the database partition.
I sent them a nastygram, you bet.
And another thing: It's 2008. Sun had a graphical tool to manage all that crap in 1998. Why doesn't Linux? (Update: Maybe YAST can do it. If I can just get YAST to work...)
That said, all the RAID/LVM stuff is at least robust. I pulled it apart and put it back together using the command line tools, and it all worked. Didn't need to change mdadm.conf or fstab at all. Mind you, that's because I got it right, but if you get it right it works. Unlike certain things I could mention...
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Okay, it's not as bad as Seagate's brick-in-a-box trick, but it's plenty annoying.
Western Digital have three lines of desktop drives: Black, the performance model; Blue, the everday model; and Green, the low-power model.
The Green range run at 5400RPM.
Western Digital not only do not advertise this fact, they go to great lengths to hide it. The speed of the Green range of drives is not stated anywhere on their website.
That leads to retailers assuming that the drives are, in fact, 7200RPM.
That leads to people buying them as replacements for actual 7200RPM drives, installing them, building them into RAID arrays, and then having to manually unpick their whole filesystem/logical volume/volume group/physical volume/RAID volume structure so that the 5400RPM drive isn't mirrored with the 7200RPM drive for the database partition.
I sent them a nastygram, you bet.
And another thing: It's 2008. Sun had a graphical tool to manage all that crap in 1998. Why doesn't Linux? (Update: Maybe YAST can do it. If I can just get YAST to work...)
That said, all the RAID/LVM stuff is at least robust. I pulled it apart and put it back together using the command line tools, and it all worked. Didn't need to change mdadm.conf or fstab at all. Mind you, that's because I got it right, but if you get it right it works. Unlike certain things I could mention...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
08:28 PM
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1
They still make 5400rpm HDs?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, January 27 2009 01:27 PM (qBCpG)
2
Apparently when they launched the "green" line, they claimed the drives were variable-speed, up to 7200 RPM, automagically adjusting under load. Everyone who tries to test them sees a 5400 RPM drive, but retailers remember seeing the higher number somewhere, so they use it. It looks like Engadget just fell for the scam again, reporting an Australian dealer's claim that WD's shiny new 2TB Green HD is 7200 RPM.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, January 27 2009 04:03 PM (2XtN5)
3
They still make 5400rpm HDs?
Sure they do. Lots of them. They're lower power, and they get used a lot in laptops. You also see them in blade servers, because they don't get as hot.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, January 27 2009 06:34 PM (+rSRq)
4
Yep, they actually target 5400 rpm drives (in 3.5" form factor, at least) to digital video recorders and similar applications. The 5400 rpm drives are quieter, cooler - because they draw less power, and don't vibrate as much as the 7200 rpm jobs. The performance is more than adequate for the video recording, and keeping heat low (to avoid having to use a fan in the box - noisy) and vibration low (again, to avoid being noisy) with the quieter drive itself helps everyone avoid having to listen to a loud hard drive in their DVR all night long...
Posted by: surly at Thursday, February 26 2009 02:47 PM (UUQ+O)
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