On Wed, Aug 15, 2001 at 02:32:47PM -0500, Brian wrote: > On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Thomas T. Veldhouse wrote: > > > You should consider Western Digital as well. Often, a particular model of > > Western Digital is the SAME drive that you get when you buy an IBM drive. I > > am not sure what sort of deal they have, but it seems there is a bit of > > overlap with respect to hardware between IBM and Western Digital. I think > > the overlap is the WD Caviar drives. I have been using these and they seem > > to run forever (knock on wood). > > That's odd, I've never heard of this before. I've had more than my share > of bad WD drives so I instantly cringe at the thought of putting a WD in > my machine. Is this pretty standard among drive models (model #241-34520 > or whatever will always be an IBM) or is it kind of random? ("hey Bob, > what are we putting in here THIS week?") I have seen this in Arizona, at "Fry's Electronics": they have long tables with mobos, harddrives, videoboards... etc. As the harddrives were sorted by capacity you can see oddities like that: two identical hdds, one with IBM label and the other with WD label. Not the same price though, the IBM was almost a few $ more. An interesting thing to note is that in benchmarks two "identical" drives from WD and IBM will yield different performance (and not allways IBM on top) - meaning that there are at least some firmware differences. florin -- "If it's not broken, is because you are not fixing it enough." 41A9 2BDE 8E11 F1C5 87A6 03EE 34B3 E075 3B90 DFE4