Maxtor or WD?

[Hadders]

Keith G. Robertson-Turner wrote:
> Dotan Cohen wrote:
>> I bought a Maxtor 160GB 8MB cache IDE hard drive that Fedora Core 5 
>> would not install to. I've replaced it with an identical Western 
>> Digital unit, and it's installing now. What would cause this
>
> I've had Maxtor drives before that were fine, in fact I don't think I've
> ever had a bad one, but I don't think that generally they are up to the
> quality of WD. IIRC they do run quite hot, so if you don't have adequate
> case cooling there might be a problem.
>
> Sometimes, however, the problem lies with the very strange ways that
> Windows handles hard drives geometries (or not, as may be the case).
>
> In exactly the same way that having a certain Linux installed partition
> layout on a disk can cause Windows to be unable to install, similarly
> having a Windows installed partition layout on a disk can sometimes
> cause Linux to refuse to install. You'd be surprised how often the
> following fixes install related problems:
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
>
> For the boot block, or:
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
>
> For the whole disk.
>
> But if you're sure that the disk has never had Windows on it before,
> then maybe you were just unlucky, and got a "Monday Morning" disk.
>
Hi.  I've just had some problems recently with a Western Digital SATA JD 
series.  I was using an adaptec SATA RAID card and they wouldn't work 
properly with the controller. In the adaptec forums apparently the WD JD 
series has a fault rewrite capability that upsets RAID controllers. So I 
returned them and got two Seagate AS series SATA disks. No problems. For 
this reason I'm now thinking twice about using Western Digital.   I've 
had bad experiences in the past with Maxtor too, so I prefer Seagate 
these days.

Also, if I want to test a disk, I boot into linux rescue from disk 1 and 
do a "badblocks -vw /dev/xxx"  this wipes everything, does 5 passes of 
writes/reads.

fdisk -l /dev/xxx will also tell you these days what the cylinder and 
other disk parameters are set to.

H