Western Digital Mixup

[Polypro]

I just picked up two WD500KS drives from CompUSA. Boxes and barcodes said WD500KS, which is the Caviar16 SE. Inside however, were WD500YS's...the Caviar RE2 Enterprise drives. Check your labels before you leave the store (I kept 'em).

P

[Lucas]

Have one of those... Good and very quiet drive.
I paid full price a couple of mos back though

[ke6guj]

I remember a couple years back picking up WD200's packaged as WD160's. The label and price was for a 160GB drive, but if you looked into the clear clamshell, you would see the model as WD200, the 200GB drive. Aparantly, WD would do that occasionally, put a larger drive in the box. Probably had to do with production rates and numbers.

I've also gotten "upgraded" Maxtor drives, not HD size, but better "rated" drives. On those you have to look at the label on the side and know what model number correspondes to which drive version.

[Polypro]

Yeah, I can hear WD at the factory:

"Hey, we're outta KS's!"

"Just throw some YS's in there...they aint gonna know the difference"

I got 'em because of SPCR's review, luckily the YS is quiet enough for me...don't know how much quieter the KS is. I havn't messed with AAM yet. What I don't know, is if the TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) is active as a single drive, or if it needs to be on a RAID controller to be enabled. WD *doesn't* recommend these as stand alone consumer drives...we'll see what happens. How often are drives recovering from errors for more than 7 seconds?

P

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by Polypro

Yeah, I can hear WD at the factory:

"Hey, we're outta KS's!"

"Just throw some YS's in there...they aint gonna know the difference"

Yup, I think thats exactly what they do. Probably cheaper to throw in a better drive with available stock instead of not fufilling an order. When they would run out of 160's, they would throw 200's in the box. IIRC, it was like that for close to a year, about 25% of the 160's I saw on the shelves were actually 200's.

And the Maxtor deal was for the retail HD's which normally include home/home office/small business rated DiamondMax's, and they threw in the enterprise rated MaxLines. the only thing was that you didn't get the extended warranty period of the Maxlines, only the 1-year for a retail-boxed HD.

[tmiranda]

Back "in the day" I worked for a company that would buy drives from one source, buy controllers from another, write our own custom firmware and sell the whole thing as a package. It was very common to have a whole series of products all in the same "product line" based on exactly the same hardware. The drives ranged from 40 MB to a maximum of 150 MB. The only difference was the firmware and low-level formatting.

One time our marketing guys wanted to sell a drive with a sub 10 ms seek time. We techies just took the 150 MB drive and modified the firmware to only access the range of cylinders that would end up with a seek time of < 10 ms. It ended up being just of 40 MB so we called the thing the "Fast 40". We priced it higher than the 150 MB drive.

Ah, those were the days.....