Western Digital Caviar (WDC) drives get along poorly with Linux

From: Jonathan Kamens (jik_at_kamens.brookline.ma.us)
Date: 12/30/03 

Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 16:44:48 +0000 (UTC)

I recently bought a Western Digital Caviar (WDC) 160GB drive
to use under Linux with my Promise Ultra66 controller.

I'm using kernel 2.4.22-ac4, and I configured the drive with
multcount=16, IO_support=0, unmaskirq=1, using_dma=1, and
readahead=8.

My machine REALLY DIDN'T LIKE the drive. All kinds of DMA
timeouts, bus resets, etc. resulted as soon as I tried to do
any significant I/O to it.

I sent the drive back and asked the vendor to send a new one.
The new one had the same problems.

I previously had a rather old WDC drive (its capacity was only
1GB!) which had similar problems -- I had to disable DMA
completely on the drive to get it to work properly.

Searches on the Web and the Usenet have revealed that a
number of other people have had similar problems with WDC
drives.

Western Digital has absolutely no information on their Web
site about whether their drives work with Linux and if so how
to configure Linux to use them properly.

Taken together, what all of this says to me is that WDC drives
do not coexist well at all with Linux, and I recommend against
anyone buying them for use in a Linux system. I'm posting
this message in an effort to perhaps save others from going
through what I went through -- perhaps someone who reads this
message will be prevented from wasting time and/or money
buying a drive that won't work for them.

Relevant Pages

  • New System planning -- Summary
    ... >To build a system that to run Linux (probably Ubuntu or Kubuntu, ... > Flat Panel monitor, Make? ... You want huge hard drives with 16 MB buffers. ... Two fast 160 GB drives will work, but not RAID, one 250 MB drive is cheaper. ...
    (Ubuntu)
  • Re: newbie question <VERY_LONG>
    ... That's what the Linux Documentation Project is for. ... That's only because the original DOS used the name to identify the type ... >partition, unless it occupies the entire disk as a primary partition. ... When the box got updated to DOS 5, the drives ...
    (alt.os.linux.redhat)
  • Re: Why I am Still Using Windows
    ... > I am assuming you are talking Windows 2000 or better. ... present, 9 Linux distros. ... We're talking things like mount points, where drives suddenly ... Get everything running right, and make a backup, Install to a new ...
    (alt.os.linux.suse)
  • Re: New Computer Install
    ... Is it better to have a seperate hard drive for linux? ... boot from a floppy in modern versions such as SuSE 10.0 or will the boot ... handle single or multiple drives well with no problem. ... There is a slight advantage I suppose in having two hard drives in ...
    (alt.os.linux)
  • Re: problems with the permissions for /mnt/windows parition
    ... >> mount, which obviously means he has totoal control over it. ... built from the ground up for personal desktops, and as linux lovies will ... that'll give you a list of the drives which the os can see. ... If you want to write to the win disk, you mite try being root. ...
    (alt.linux)