1 TB WD10EARS desynch issues in RAID

[KCPTECH]

I purchased 64 of these drives that I thought would be quite fast compared to the troubled Seagate 7200.11 SD15 that I had to replace. In stand alone, the drives perform very well. The software conversion (Latest Paragon Align Utility) worked well to make the drives operate under Windows XP. Unfortunately, this utility will not see the drives through a RAID controller on PCI-E BUS. Using the jumper alternative renders the drives with corruption on RAID controllers.

The drives were placed into 16 x Intel i7 860 workstations on RAID10 for stripe/redundancy secondary storage for research purposes. The systems are in an environmentally controlled room. The systems are 4U rack with great cooling and powered by 1200 Watt PC Power & Cooling. More than enough power. Our ASUS research division at Queens University found the drives to desync after a few minutes. When the RAID controllers let the drives go on their own (non-RAID) for Diagnostics and transfer test, they were fast. Put back into RAID, they slowed to the point where a complex 700MB file would take nearly 28 minutes to move and more to copy. CPU usage was less than 10% on all cores, but would spike at times to 80% when the Intel ICH10R was used.

We assumed it may be a compatibility issue using a low level controller, so I authorized the purchase of 16 x Adaptec 3405 SATA300/SAS RAID Controllers which claims support for Advance Format, but not WDs as it appears. But even when these were set up correctly, the WD 10EARS dropped in speed right after their buffer emptied. Sustained transfers were only as fast as you old 80GB BB IDE. At times stalling the systems. I even took a couple home and tried them in simple RAID1 mirror, and same thing.

Systems at School are:

Intel i7 860

Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus

Gigabyte P55A-UD3 v1.0 F5 Bios

4 GB Kit Corsair DDR3-1600 XMP CMX4GX3M2A1600C9

2 x 150 GB WD VelociRaptors RAID0 (Mobo)

4 x 1TB WD 10EARS RAID10 (Card)

Adaptec 3805 SATA300/SAS RAID Controller

2 x Pioneer DVR-218LBK/22X DVD-Writer (Mobo)

BFG GTX 260 Maxcore55

1200 Watt PC Power & Cooling

ChenLee Custom 4U (2 forward 120mm, 2 rear 80mm)

We can’t take these back as they are opened and had them longer than 2 weeks. I wanted the Western Digital RE3 (WD1002FBYS) 1000GB for their enterprise reliability, but the distributor here says WD no longer has them and are pushing the larger EARS drives. The store where we purchased them suggested I contact Western Digital for a solution. I was looking on your site for some sort of Firmware update, like Seagate and Maxtor had, but I couldn’t find anything. Ironically, I purchased 4 older 1TB WD10EADS drives from a company 2,500 miles away, and they worked well. It appears to be a problem with the 64MB EARS drives not synching correctly to their proper speeds. Even under AHCI in Vista SP2 or Server 2008, the drives almost stall out in any RAID controller. Currently I would suggest another sticker on the package, as to not ideal for RAID, but rather single drive solution.

[Bill_S · Accepted solution]

Our only Green drives that are RAID compatible are Models: WD2002FYPS, WD1000FYPS, WD7500AYPS, and WD5000ABPS.  None of the Caviar Green drives, including the EARS drives are RAID compatible.  That's why they will continue to fall out of the RAID arrays.

[KCPTECH]

Thank you for responding. The WD suppliers in Ontario, Canada need to be told this as for they are the ones that told Kingston Computers and Canada Computers that the new EARS drives are the best for data storage in Redundant Arrays. I only purchased 64 of them but the IT for Queens had over 1,000 systems built and all have two 1TB EARS drives on their mirror arrays. And, the EARS drives are the only ones most stores stock.

I couldn't take the drives back, so we basically chalked up them as a waste and moved away from WD products. Personally, I've always liked WD drives as far back as when Quantum was competing with them. The faculty went with purchasing Hitachi Drives. Something I worry about as they acquired IBM's Deskstar (a.k.a. Deathstar for their high failure rate) division. So now I have 4 cases of these useless 1TB WD10EARS drives. I say useless as I have found that these drives, even in single mode start to slow down after the first 2 minutes of use.

Hopefully, WD can discover the problem with drive's out of order writing slowdown, even with the jumper in use on Windows XP, Server 2003 and Linux Systems.

[eclectic]

It is NOT well-publicized that the EARS drives or even EADS drives are not RAID compatible.  In fact, I was about to purchase them when I discovered this data performing my due diligence.

Mirroring is a logical use for such a large drive due the the issue of loss on failure.  This should be "stickered" on the drive and put into the literature. Prominently.

[eclectic]

An additional question....What drives are included when you order the 8TB Sharespace external storage?  I cannot locate that information.  If it is the EARS/EADS drives, then something is seriously wrong here.

[congee]

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Bill_S wrote:

Our only Green drives that are RAID compatible are Models: WD2002FYPS, WD1000FYPS, WD7500AYPS, and WD5000ABPS.  None of the Caviar Green drives, including the EARS drives are RAID compatible.  That's why they will continue to fall out of the RAID arrays.

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Could you please tell me where on the WD website (NOT the community) it says that the WD10EARS is not recommended for consumer/at-home RAID?

[Bill_S]

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1397

[congee]

Thank you for the link.

The issue is that I purchased two of these drives for my NAS. Now, after a lot of reading, I find out that these drives will not work in my NAS. It would have been nice if WD had put that on the website where the specs are, as opposed to BURYING it in the FAQs. Personally, I never look into the FAQs if I want product specs, nor should you expect me to.

I can't return these to my reseller because they are opened and I am outside of my window.

What am I supposed to do now? Can you arrange for an exchange for 2 drives that work?

[Bill_S]

That's something you would have to contact WD's Technical Support about.  You can do so by phone or email.

To Contact WD for Technical Support
http://support.wdc.com/contact/index.asp?lang=en

[iRon74]

So, what about the MyBook World Edition II 2TB NAS device, which comes with 2xWD10EADS green desktop drives pre-configured in RAID? Is that a joke, or WD has a trick to get the drives work in RAID?