WD WD1002FAEX

Hi,

I (foolishly) bought two of these drives for a Duo two weeks ago without checking the compatibility list to upgrade from 2x500GB WD drives. Exact drive = WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0.

Have tried hot swapping each drive in turn according to the instructions and neither work so far. Errors are the same for both:

'The disk attached to channel 1 could not be used. The most common reasons are RAID resync in progress, faulty drives, and disks that are too small to be added to the array.'
'A SATA reset has been performed on one or more of your disks that may have affected the RAID parity integrity. It is recommended that you perform a RAID volume resync from the RAID Settings tab ( accessible in the Volumes page => Volume tab in FrontView ). The resync process will run in the background, and you can continue to use the ReadyNAS in the meantime.'
Blinking light error has been constant for each drive.

There has been no sync progress (only 114GB stored on the 500GB drive on the Duo and left the first disk in situ for 48 hours).

Is there anyone who knows what I can do to attempt to use these disks? Would a jumper make any difference? Any disk firmware upgrade that could make any difference?

Thanks in advance.

John

Thanks For The Feedback.....

Roy

Have you tried enabling TLER on the drives first?

Hi,

I'm thinking about using the WD WD1002FAEX with the NVX Pro Pioneer. Do these problems still exist, or are they solved with the new firmware? Could any help me please?

Regards

I'm interested in knowing the progress of this model too. Being new to ReadyNAS, I bought disks at the same time as my ReadyNAS unit (ultra 6 plus). I bought 4 of these 1002FEAX 1TB drives, and now I find they are not usable. This really surprised me, since I've used these as internal drives before and just thought they were standard types of good quality SATA drives. With my Mac Pro I just plugged them in and they worked. Why is that not possible with RAID? Is there some low-level stuff going on that makes for more issues with particular drives? It would be nice to see a full explanation given on the FAQ - I couldn't see one there.

I can guess why there is a compatibility list (to protect users against data loss from untested models), but it would have been nice to have seen a large warning sign of some kind saying "Do NOT buy drives until you've bought the NAS!!". I only knew of the HCL's existence once I started reading the manual - and that was only once I had the product unpacked. This is a bit "cart before horse", and I think Netgear ought to consider making this issue more prominent on their web site, on the pages where potential customers are browsing. I'm pretty savvy about IT in general but new to RAID and NAS - and I missed it.

Now I'm not sure whether to return the three drives I haven't opened for a refund or whether to wait a while in the hope that this model might be included soon... any advice on that, anyone?

I would return the drives as soon as you can. There is no guarantee that the drives will pass the test when they are tested. One of the problems with drives in a Raid configuration is that they have to be synchronized for them to work efficiently. Some drives have features in their electronics that want to operate the drives spin down and features, especially the green drives. This in effect fights the Raid controller.

While the drives in question are fairly new 6Gb/s drives and are not green drives (7200 RPM) they may pass when tested. They are a little on the higher end of the cost curve than other 1TB drives, even the WD drives. It also does not help that WD strongly discourages the use of consumer grade drives in a Raid environment, only supporting the more expensive enterprise drives, which have greater vibration stability.

That's very helpful PapaBear - thanks for the explanation, it makes sense. I have returned the 3 unopened drives and I'll order some from the list now.

Hmm.. still have problems, even with a compatible drive (WD RE4 WD1003FBYX). It takes a couple of minutes showing the logo, then boots and says "No disks detected". ?? So I can't even get to square one here :( I'll try another slot...

Last year I bougth two SAMSUNG HD103SJ but for 2 weeks ago I suddently get an harddisk crash and one of them where dead. I send the disk for service and due to the shortage of harddrives they gave me an Western Digital Black 1002FAEX. Nice drive but I was really dubtfull because the lack of compatibillity with disks. I told the service guy that and get the right to return it if I not broke the ESD bag. When I check the offical HCL for ReadyNAS Duo I can read that the 2TB version are supported. Will this mean that the 1TB version also is supported? Should you return the disk based on this thread? Did anyone have problems with two different brands Samsung and Western?

No. If the 1TB version is not on the list but the 2TB is, the 1TB is still unsupported.