ReadyNAS NV+ V2 with WD20EARS ?

dadioh wrote:

I ordered a new ReadyNAS NV+ V2 and have not yet received it. Before the purchase I checked the compatibility list and was certain the WD20ears was on the HCL (I even went and checked the drives I had to make sure the revision numbers were OK). I was going through the list again tonight and noticed the WD20EARX was there but not the EARS. The only thing I can think of is that I must have clicked the Duo V2 by mistake which does list the EARS model. So what is the potential impact for me of using my existing WD20EARS drives in the NV_ V2? I have 4 of them ready to put in there but now I may be hitting a wall. I have a single WD20EARX in my backup collection but I don't relish the thought of needing to go buy 3 more. How serious would be the ramifications of using the EARS drives?

I very, very, very highly recommend you to disable head parking in the EARS disks with the WDIDLE3 utility before using them in a RAID. I have just finished recovery of a four-disk RAID5 array with WD15EARS in a NAS from a competing vendor, and these drives have parked their way to dusty death. Two failed drives before starting (which dropped the array permanently of course), a third failing at the end of recovery. Now only one is left without any read errors, and that drive has seen 364166 head parkings. Naturally, this equipment wasn't mine, but I wouldn't use these drives without extreme caution (and I'm normally a WD guy).

These disks were manufactured in december 2009.

Luckily all data was recovered (but it took close to a week to assemble all stuff, no, not full time but anyway).