WD2002FYPS - 2TB

WD RE4-GP (WD2002FYPS)
3.5-inch Enterprise SATA Hard Drives
2 TB, 1.2 million hours MTBF, 64 MB Cache, IntelliPower
Manufacturer Information

Background

I've been waiting for ReadyNAS Pro units to be re-stocked by suppliers in Australia for a few weeks (months?) now and they have finally arrived! I did a bit of research, as most users in this thread have, and decided to go with Western Digital's 2.0TB Enterprise green drives, even though there seems to be a potential issue with LCC activity.

I purchased six (6) WD2002FYPS units today for the ReadyNAS Pro which will act as a replacement for an existing ReadNAS NV+. I will install three (3) WD2002FYPS units initially in an X-RAID2 configuration and then keep the remaining units as reserve in case of failure, until needed (when capacity hits 80%) or to test any future WD2002FYPS firmware upgrades.

Model: ReadyNAS Pro Business Edition [X-RAID2] 
Serial: ------RS001--
Firmware: RAIDiator 4.2.4    
Memory: 3072 MB [4-5-5-15] 
  
MAC address: 00:1F:--:--:--:73 
IP address 1: 192.168.0.212 

MAC address: 00:1F:--:--:--:72 
IP address 2: Not Connected 
  
Volume C:  Online, X-RAID2, 3 disks, 0% of 3692 GB used

Hardware Upgrades

After removing the three (3) factory supplied 500GB Seagate drives and installing three (3) WD2002FYPS drives I installed a single 2GB KVR800D2N6 memory module. Once the drive and memory upgrade was complete, the unit was powered on for the first time, and by default (after 8 minutes) proceeded to automatically configure X-RAID2. After 3 hours, the X-RAID2 resync is 40% complete and the three (3) WD2002FYPS drives have the following SMART statistics:

SMART Information for Disk 1

Model: WDC WD2002FYPS-01U1B0 
Serial: WD-WCAVY-----44 
Firmware: 04.05G04 

SMART Attribute 
Raw Read Error Rate 0; Spin Up Time 0 ; Start Stop Count 3 ; Reallocated Sector Count 0 ; Seek Error Rate 0 ; Power On Hours 240 ; Spin Retry Count 0 ; Calibration Retry Count 0 ; Power Cycle Count 2 ; Power-Off Retract Count 1 ; Load Cycle Count 5 ; Temperature Celsius 41 ; Reallocated Event Count 0 ; Current Pending Sector 0 ; Offline Uncorrectable 0 ; UDMA CRC Error Count 0 ; Multi Zone Error Rate 0 ; ATA Error Count 0

SMART Information for Disk 2

Model: WDC WD2002FYPS-01U1B0 
Serial: WD-WCAVY-----73 
Firmware: 04.05G04 

SMART Attribute 
Raw Read Error Rate 0 ; Spin Up Time 0 ; Start Stop Count 4 ; Reallocated Sector Count 0 ; Seek Error Rate 0 ; Power On Hours 246 ; Spin Retry Count 0 ; Calibration Retry Count 0 ; Power Cycle Count 2 ; Power-Off Retract Count 1 ; Load Cycle Count 5 ; Temperature Celsius 44 ; Reallocated Event Count 0 ; Current Pending Sector 0 ; Offline Uncorrectable 0 ; UDMA CRC Error Count 0 ; Multi Zone Error Rate 0 ; ATA Error Count 0

SMART Information for Disk 3

Model: WDC WD2002FYPS-01U1B0 
Serial: WD-WCAVY-----96 
Firmware: 04.05G04 

SMART Attribute 
Raw Read Error Rate 0 ; Spin Up Time 0 ; Start Stop Count 4 ; Reallocated Sector Count 0 ; Seek Error Rate 0 ; Power On Hours 247 ; Spin Retry Count 0 ; Calibration Retry Count 0 ; Power Cycle Count 2 ; Power-Off Retract Count 1 ; Load Cycle Count 4 ; Temperature Celsius 42 ; Reallocated Event Count 0 ; Current Pending Sector 0 ; Offline Uncorrectable 0 ; UDMA CRC Error Count 0 ; Multi Zone Error Rate 0 ; ATA Error Count 0

LCC - Low Count?

I'm a bit perplexed about the reported "Power On Hours" being 240 hours+ (as they were factory sealed) but the "Load Cycle Count" appears to be in single figures at this stage. Further research on the Western Digital website uncovered this information:

Why is the S.M.A.R.T Attribute 193 Load/Unload counter increasing for my WD RE2-GP SATA II hard drive (WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0, WD7500AYPS-01ZKB0, WD7501AYPS-01ZKB0)? Symptom: WD drives are designed to reduce power consumption, in part by positioning the heads in a park position (unloading the heads) and turning off unnecessary electronics, resulting in substantial power savings. WD defines this mode as Idle 3. Some utilities, operating systems, and applications, such as some implementations of Linux, for example, are not optimized for low power storage devices and can cause our drives to wake up at a higher rate than normal. This effectively negates the power-saving advantages of low-power drives, such as Western Digital’s RE2GP, and artificially increases the number of load-unload cycles. Solution: The number of systems using such applications and utilities is limited and customers can resolve this symptom by optimizing their systems to not wake up the drives unnecessarily every 10 to 30 seconds or so, thereby gaining substantial power savings and eliminating superfluous activity. Most customers, when made aware of the unnecessary activity caused by their systems, have modified their utility, operating systems, or applications to take advantage of Western Digital's advanced power-saving mode. Other customers have requested a utility (See link below) to modify the behavior of the drive to wait longer before invoking Idle 3 mode. Although such a change eliminates significant power savings during periods of inactivity. This update is described in WD's Process Change Notice PCN 2579-701324-A02 (see attached PDF file). Please click on this link, RE2GP Idle Mode Update Utility, to download the utility. NOTE: The update also supports a low-power spin-up feature optimized for highly energy efficient, large scale storage applications, which is enabled using a utility, WDSpinUp Utility, also available at the RE2GP Download page.

Note the above quote in red. Even though this FAQ specifically addresses WD1000FYPS/WD RE2-GP (1.0TB) units, it's quite possible Western Digital (given time and feedback) may create a similar "RE4GP Idle Mode Update Utility" to address the same issues our WD2002FYPS drives are experiencing.

A Western Digital supported utility?

The current "RE2GP" idle mode utility is freely available on the WD1000FYPS download page, but at this point in time no corresponding utility is available on the WD2002FYPS download page. It might be worth keeping an eye on this download page to see if a RE4GP utility appears over the next few weeks, otherwise you can pro actively ask Western Digital to release this utility on this support web page.

As a final note, at the beginning of the X-RAID2 resync, I disabled a few services as indicated in the following log summary:

 Fri Jul 31 00:24:12 EST 2009 Successfully stopped UPnP service. 
 Fri Jul 31 00:24:12 EST 2009 Printers no longer advertised over Bonjour. 
 Fri Jul 31 00:24:12 EST 2009 FrontView no longer advertised over Bonjour. 
 Fri Jul 31 00:23:51 EST 2009 Successfully stopped AFP service. 
 Fri Jul 31 00:23:51 EST 2009 AFP service no longer advertised over Bonjour. 
 Fri Jul 31 00:21:18 EST 2009 Successfully synchronized clock with a NTP server. 

What Next ...

Using "WDIDLE3.EXE" might be the way to go, but I'm not convinced just yet (mainly because it voids my warranty) and I'll petition Western Digital for a supported utility or firmware upgrade. When it comes to altering WD2002FYPS firmware in the future, I'll simply update a single drive at a time and re-sync overnight so hopefully the X-RAID2 technology should handle it.

I'll let you know how the setup goes over the next few days ...