HDD problem?

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Akin

Akin

Well-known member
Oct 22, 2022
45
3
Greetings all!

Sorry for the lame title, but for the life of me I can't remember what the problem was called.

It was on a podcast episode some time back. HDD manufacturers were using some kind of lame tech that made their allegedly high-performance HDDs suck. Western Digital was doing it along with some others, and apparently even some of their Black line of HDDs had the problem.

I need to buy a new HDD, and I've been buying WD Black HDDs for many, many years, so I want to get a new one... but I want to make sure that I get a good one.

Does anyone remember what the issue was actually called? If I could figure that out, I could search around a bit more and make sure that I get a drive without it...

Thanks!
 
SMR - Shingled Magnetic Recording
There was some discussion on SMR on Episode #800, Jan 05, 2021.

www.notebookcheck.net

Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba have been using slower technology in some recent hard drives without telling customers

Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba have been in the news recently for using SMR technology in drives without advertising them as such. In the case of Western Digital and Seagate, it consisted of substituting SMR drives into product lines that didn't previously use the technology, impacting...
www.notebookcheck.net www.notebookcheck.net
 
Last edited:
Ahh, yeah, that was it.

Thanks!

Now, to find out if the drive I was looking at has it or not... thinking about that Black 10tb HDD...
 
Also, don't go with a hybrid drive - part SSD and part HDD. I think those were a boondoggle and often the SSD part would be too small and would bottleneck large transfer performance. And the SSD piece wears out fast.

May your bits be stable and your interfaces be fast. :cool: Ron
 
When I try to boot my acer laptop with an older HGST 55Gb drive (spare) installed (which I hope to re use) I get a message indicating the hdd is password locked... I have no idea what the pw may be and cannot get a into bios or boot menu. Tried to initialize the drive with Windows 10 disk management and tried formatting with mini-tool partition wizard, with diskpart which reported an error finding the volume... Any advice will be much appreciated! ;-)
 
Tim said:
hdd is password locked
Click to expand...
Sounds like a previous computer's BIOS applied some sort of a lock to the HDD. I believe there is an ATA command which can override the drive lockout by wiping it clean, but I don't know which, if any tools, support invoking it. Hopefully someone who has some actual experience with this type of problem will post something helpful.
 
Try wiping the drive with Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN).
sourceforge.net

Darik's Boot and Nuke

Download Darik's Boot and Nuke for free. A hard drive disk wipe and data clearing utility. Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot image that securely wipes hard disk drives (HDDs). DBAN is appropriate for personal use, bulk data destruction, or emergency data destruction for...
sourceforge.net sourceforge.net
 
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