A reason to avoid western digital?

[Sef]

From the New York Times (7 December 2007):

The file blocking is not in the hard drive itself but in an Internet file sharing service called Mio that is included with the drive. This service, Mionet , which was acquired by Western Digital earlier this year, has two aspects: It lets you connect to your own files from anywhere on the Internet. And it also lets you specify certain folders that you can share with your friends.

[mips]

Originally Posted by sr20ve I work for a certain tech support department and I probably see about 5-10 failed hard drives every day. Most failed hard drives I see are correctable with firmware updates, but among all those failed drives, I'd say the most common drives I see failed are: Maxtors, Western Digitals and Seagates. From what I've seen, IBM, Fujitsu and Hitachi have the lowest failure rates and almost never have firmware updates.

I agree on the Maxtors, the Seagate & WD I think is because there is simply so many of them out there compared to IBM, Hitachi etc. which sell in way lesser volumes.

[OffHand]

Originally Posted by Sef From the New York Times (7 December 2007):

The file blocking is not in the hard drive itself but in an Internet file sharing service called Mio that is included with the drive. This service, Mionet , which was acquired by Western Digital earlier this year, has two aspects: It lets you connect to your own files from anywhere on the Internet. And it also lets you specify certain folders that you can share with your friends.

Although I think that it is kind of lame to block certain file types I do not have a problem with it. The program is an extra, not what I bought it for and I won't use it. I haven't tried using it with ssh yet, but I am sure I won't have a problem getting it to work.

[AndyC_772]

Another vote for Samsung drives here. I've been running a couple of 160GB drives in my Tivo for a couple of years now with no problems at all, and they're whisper quiet too. Previously I used Maxtor drives but, running 24x7 in a warm environment used to wreck about one a year.

I have a Samsung in my laptop now too - also totally reliable so far and much quieter than the Hitachi it replaced.

FYI the only Seagate drives with a problem seem to be the Freeagent Pro series, which are quite 'intelligent' and contain the offending power-down feature. I have three FreeAgent (non-'Pro') drives and they're just totally generic USB 2.0 units with no 'nasties' to report at all. I use them with my Linux based file server to keep nightly backups and never had a problem.

[mips]

I actually went out and purchased a 500GB WD MyBook Essential Edition to backup my 2x160GB WD desktop drives & my 40GB Seagate laptop drive.

Works a charm, just formatted it to get rid of whatever they put on it.