On Wednesday 29 October 2008 05:28, Rodney Baker wrote:
On Wednesday 29 October 2008 09:35:32 Randall R Schulz wrote:
...
Only in the past few weeks have I seriously considered switching drive manufacturers, though, after an email exchange with WD in which they say that their product is unsupported under Linux.
That's a curious notion. They obviously must
Huh. It looks like I didn't finish that thought. I was going to say that they obviously must support all the pertinent standards for the interface they support, which makes the essential functions entirely agnostic to the OS and hardware that accesses the drive (assuming it, too, implements the pertinent standards properly).
The Western Digital drive I just bought (see below) does include some Mac-specific software that performs the breathtaking function of telling you (in a system menu) how much of the drive is currently occupied by file data _and_ (get this) presents this utilization fraction in a front-panel bar-graph-style display comprising 8 white-light LEDs behind the front panel. All very cute... [...]
The ironic thing is that many if not most of these WD "MyBook" drives actually run BusyBox (embedded Linux) under the hood. The "My Book World Edition" (which, out of the box, is probably one of the most unreliable pieces of network kit I've ever played with) can, with a little bit of judicious hacking, be turned into a full-blown file/print/mail server, albeit one with a very slow network interface (I think because the ARM processor in the unit is so underpowered).
Mine is the "Studio Edition" and is just a disk, no NAS / SAN / SAMBA / NFS / etc. capabilities.
I have had to recover 2 of these units for their owners - the original hard disk images that WD used to build the drivers had corruption/errors ...
I hope the drive hardware isn't as bad as you describe the networking software...
...
Cheers, Rodney.
Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org