[mythtv-users] How is this pricing possible?

[Alex Butcher]

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.  Many of the people commenting negatively about this
don't seem to be that knowledgeable, so it may well be that using hdparm to
disable the power management settings fixes this problem and makes them as
good as any other WD drive. Note, however, that performance won't be as good
as the Caviar Black models, but they're about twice the price!

> Thanks
> Bobby

HTH,
Alex (using two*WD Caviar Black 2TB since mid-Dec '10, having switched
a long allegiance from Seagate to WD after Seagate's firmware issues)