Friday 28 December 2012

Western Digital USB Drives Use A Proprietary Drive PCB for USB

This comes via the SBS2K Yahoo Group.

Apparently, Western Digital in their great wisdom has decided to mass produce a hard drive controller with only one interface on it: USB.

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And:

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As a rule we have been using the StarTech 4 bay SuperSpeed drive dock with bare drives for our backup rotations that we run.

For clients that have been running their own backup rotations we have been recommending the WD non-Green USB drives as we have had pretty good success with them. The same goes for the Seagate USB drives that are not “Green” in nature.

The one thing we have noticed with the manufacturer built USB drives is that there is a tendency to use 5400 RPM drives. And now, perhaps we are limited in how we can access a drive if something goes wrong with the controller.

Our preference for bare backup drives are:

  1. Seagate Enterprise Storage (ES or Constellation) series SATA
  2. Western Digital Black Label (non-Advanced Format for VHD/Backup VHD)

Both drives are 7200 RPM with better firmware than the retail/consumer drives. So, they will perform better and last longer due to ongoing handling during rotations.

We may request that in the future clients only purchase a certain drive and USB enclosure for their backups so that we have some control over what drives are used for backups.

As usual, it is Buyer Beware.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Windows Live Writer

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi - I've considered using bare drives but I'm concerned about damage after they are pulled from the dock. Do you do anything special to protect/handle them? Are your clients adequately careful?