Like many sysadmins I was hit by the Seagate 1TB drive issue from a year or so ago. Fair enough, these things happen.

But the complete lack of acknowledgement that there were machines out there using these drives and running something called Linux was a real disappointment. As usual we fixed the issue ourselves - but Seagate provided absolutely no help at all.

So we note them down as not Linux friendly - and then switch to WD or Fujitsu-Siemens.

It's about time that the hardware companies out there realised a simple truth.

Us techies try to keep all the IT stuff working - and Open Source software makes our lives much easier due to it being massively better than closed source - and so we are trying to encourage it - we note companies who don't 'get it' - and as we make the buying decisions we buy from OSS supporting companies - so companies who are supporting OSS will sell more stuff.

As well as buying stuff for our own companies we recommend stuff for the usual range of friends and family as we're the ones they always ask for advice.

So suddenly you've got a vast army of techies recommending against your product - and that's why the bottom line gets hit - look what we did to SCO for an example.

MTBF used to be : Mean Time Before failure

Now it means

Megabyties Till boot failure ...

...how much of it is due to the WDTV? It'd be interesting to see those numbers.

Oh and AC - I have 5 computers at home running 14 WD HDDs running the gamut from 320Gb to a rig with 5x1TB... some of these drives are getting long in the tooth, but not ONE of them ever gave me grief. Which is why I standardised my setup to use WD drives exclusively. You must just have bad luck.