Don't buy chinese Hard Drives!

[IcEWoLF]

They may contain viruses
God with all the crap going in this world, first tooth paste, then toys, now your freaking computer? Whats next?
I am staying away from Chinese things when I am going to buy presents for this Christmas season (especially for my little cousins).

 

[bateau980]

If I'm guessing right... you're referring to the Seagate fiasco that was mostly contained and none of the drives reached U.S. soil. I have no fear. If you want to be safe, reformat the poor thing and keep an active Anti-Virus program.

As for all of the other problems, I'm there with ya. Glad I don't have any kids to buy toys for.

 

[Ramy]

I always format my drives before using them.

 

[Hall]

Are hard drive makers pre-formatting drives now ? I know that external drives are pre-formatted FAT32 and if internals are, I'd suspect they'll be FAT32 also. Anyone running Win95 or better can read that, of course, but Windows 2000/XP and Vista are probably better off using NTFS.

 

[bateau980]

I believe most drives are formatted FAT32. I'll usually convert them to NTFS right out of the box, the only exception being my new Seagate 500 GB External. I left it with whatever partition type it had since I didn't want to hunt down the software to turn off the darn yellow light. (Software comes as part of the original load of the drive. Yes it is downloadable, but I'm lazy and haven't had time.)

 

[Foxbat]

I believe most drives are formatted FAT32. I'll usually convert them to NTFS right out of the box, the only exception being my new Seagate 500 GB External. I left it with whatever partition type it had since I didn't want to hunt down the software to turn off the darn yellow light. (Software comes as part of the original load of the drive. Yes it is downloadable, but I'm lazy and haven't had time.)

It depends on which one you get. My FreeAgent 500GB I picked up last month had zilch in the way of software. I downloaded the FreeAgent utility from Seagate, disabled the sleep functionality, and reformatted it on my ViP622, so I really didn't care if it had software or not.

 

[charper1]

I always format my drives before using them.

Agreed! This is much to do about nothing.

"Taiwanese distributor Xander International had discovered that 1,800 Maxtor Basics 500GB hard drives were affected, all manufactured by a subcontractor in Thailand."

"This isn't the first time that subcontractors have been blamed for virus infections on storage media. A year ago, Apple shipped a number of video iPod systems infected with a virus. The company blamed a contract manufacturer for the problem."