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Originally Posted by cc_in_oh
Mine is just a cheap Seagate 4TB - I'd expect WD to be better.
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Likely not.
Hard drives are commodities these days, and generally similar. Given the same specs, it normally doesn't matter whose name is on the box, and competition is on price. Once upon a time, there were something like 30 drive manufacturers. No longer. How many folks remember Miniscribe, Quantum, Micropolis or Connor Peripherals? (The last was a company set up by a former Seagate executive targeting the laptop market.) I had all of those in systems at one time or another.
These days, I believe the main suppliers are Seagate, WD, Hitachi, and Toshiba.
And WD began life as a manufacturer of drive
controllers, in the days when the controller for hard drives was a separate card plugging into the motherboard. These days, drives include controllers as part of the drive itself. WD morphed into a full drive manufacturer to stay in business (if memory serves, by buying an existing drive manufacturer.)
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Since the drive never gets "ejected", I've always wondered how the router manages it to avoid errors - I could never find any documentation on that. Especially since mine gets written to every day, and rudely shut down every night when I turn off the power bar it and the router are plugged into.
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Current drives are a lot more robust than they once were. Power going away doesn't normally corrupt file systems, and recovery is fairly simple. (Current file systems tend to be journaling and capable of being restored to the last known good state.) The last time I had a major problem, it was bad luck - a directory happened to reside on a block that had gone bad. The underlying data the directory pointed to was all there and unharmed, but the pointers to it were gone.
Recovery recreated the pointers and assigned them to a directory created by the recovery process to hold them, which then got re-named and put in the right place in the hierarchy. (This was under NTFS on Windows. A FAT file system would have been a much harder problem.)
I do tend to specifically Eject a plug-in USB drive as a "belt-and-suspenders" move, but I've never seen a problem from neglecting to do so.
But I'm curious - why power off every night? The router here is always on because things can occur in the wee hours.
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Dennis