Re: WD MyBook eSATA spindown revisited
Baron
> I bought this external drive for less than what the same bare drive
> (actually a WDC WD5000AACS-0 GreenPower inside) would have cost. Today
> the enclosure failed so I yanked the drive out and placed it in an
> Antec eSATA/USB enclosure I had purchased months ago.
>
> I found out that the interface within the WD enclosure actually
> controls the drives power state so there is no hdparm/sdparm command
> that will clear the standby bit because there isn't one. In it's new
> Antec case the drive does not standby. Oh and now these direct access
> parameters
> are supported: WP=0 DPOFUA=0 whereas they weren't in the WD case.
>
> I would warn readers not to purchase the MyBook Home edition. I've
> read that there are lots of problems with the enclosure electronics
> after mine died for no reason. However the 500 gig GreenPower drive
> seems to be worth the $120US I paid. The same store sells the bare 500
> gig drive for $20US more, go figure.
It never occurred to me that the case controller would not be command
transparent !
I agree with your price comment. I've seen that here as well !
--
Best Regards:
Baron.
Baron
> It is not as far as I mentioned above seeing the direct access issues
> and how the drive is enumerated by the BIOS. In the WD case, BIOS
> shows it as MyBook 0100. In the Antec case it shows WD5000AACS 0100
> hence the Antec peripheral control electronics are totally
> transparent. I was fairly surprised to find this out and the drive
> does perform better now with sustained I/O right around 45 MByte/sec
> even though the drive is formatted NTFS !
Its astounding that WD have used an interface which, in my view, could
be argued to be defective, and even if it wasn't, causes a performance
hit. Anything but a good advert for the company or its products !
That said WD and Seagate have enviable reputations, you would think
that WD valued theirs !
>> I agree with your price comment. I've seen that here as well !
>
> I'd buy another just to rip it out of the case however the next buy
> will be a 1 TB SATA. With the internal 500 GB SATA, and external 500
> GB eSATA and a 320 GB USB external I'm set for a while as far as
> storage is concerned. I do some A/V production which has gone from
> hobby status to a semi-professional basis so I need to have a certain
> amount of hours of storage which I now have.
It might be worth looking at a Linux based NAS box if you have a need
for very large storage capacity.
--
Best Regards:
Baron.