[mythtv-users] How is this pricing possible?

[Raymond Wagner]

On 2/23/2011 02:47, Alex Butcher wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Feb 2011, Bobby Gill wrote:
>
>> Looking at hard drives on Newegg (I'm Canadian):
>>
>> http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136317
>> ^^ This is a WD Green 1TB/32mb cache for $74.99
>>
>> http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514
>> ^^ This is a WD Green 2TB/64MB cache for $84.99
>>
>> Admittedly I'm fairly out of the loop with hardware news and the market, but
>> is this "just the way it is" for the time or is there something else going
>> on? Is the 2TB flawed? 4/5 eggs with 830 reviews, same rating as the 1TB.
> The 2TB EARS drive is priced similarly cheaply in the UK. They have a bit of
> a reputation, but as far as I can tell it's because - in the cause of their
> 'Green' branding - their default power management settings are *very*
> aggressive, resulting in them quickly accumulating tens of thousands of head
> load/unload cycles.

They also have a bit of a nasty flaw where they are internally a 4K 
sector drive, but rather than report themselves as such, and have modern 
operating systems just handle that characteristic automatically, they 
report themselves as a 512b sector drive and rely on special Windows 
drivers to behave properly.  If you do not partition and format them 
properly to ensure alignment, disk performance will suffer greatly.