[LAU] External USB 2 HD for real-time recording

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 2013-03-09 at 18:44 +0100, Robin Gareus wrote:
> On 03/09/2013 05:39 PM, Peder Hedlund wrote:
> > Quoting Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net>:
> > 
> > 
> >> "All WD external hard drives will spin down (enter into power saver
> >> mode) after 10 minutes of drive inactivity. Once the drive is accessed
> >> again, the drive will exit from the power saver mode and spin back up.
> > 
> > If it's designed to spin down it's probably also designed to be able to
> > handle that.
> 
> Don't count on it. Joern recently told me about his experience with
> similar "Green" WD drives where the drive died for him after a few month
> of continued use. He mentioned something about a special windows driver
> that controls the spin up/down cycles for WD drives, but I did not
> bother to inquire the details.

Hi Robin,

I like that you set "Green" in quotes.

When I searched for external drives the WD seems to be the most pleasant
drives. I didn't ask the community, but read some reports ;).

It's exactly what I fear, if I'll use the drive very often, it will die
exactly in 2 years and 1 day, when there's no warranty anymore. If it
would die during period of warranty, it would be much more worse. My
dealer would send me a new drive, that's not the issue, but to copy > 1
TiB of data from a click-click drive each half year isn't fun, even if
most data should be available by the internal drives.

IMO it's bad hardware design. Would anybody use a 3.5" drive that needs
an external power supply, as portable accessory for a battery powered
computer? We even wouldn't save the planet, since the less power
consumption does pollute our world less, than replacing every few month
the drive by a new drive.

Until now all my internal drives died after around 2 years, the Samsung
I'm using now are already 4 and 5 years old :) *knocking on wood*. I
only hot glued the first generation SATA connectors, because they lose
contact from time to time, before I did this, but those drives don't
cause issues since the connectors are hot glued.

Regards,
Ralf