WD20EARS just added on the official HCL - mistake and issues

ddomnick wrote:

I purchased 4 WD20EARS-00J2GB0 drives from NewEgg. Followed CommanderQ's procedure exactly except used WD3IDLE to change the LCC value BEFORE starting to 5 seconds. Using latest -T29 beta firmware on 1100. Everything went perfectly, reboots were normal, no issues at all. Copied several hundred gig of data in several batches back to the NAS. Write speeds were an acceptable 25MBS (CIFS + Jumbo Frames + large movie files). Just before bed I rebooted NAS - it did not come right back up and I thought I had a problem. When I woke, I found the NAS up and no errors. Log did not state that it had to resync, but it did take 26 minutes between shutdown and power up entries. The problem now is that writes are painfully slow at ~7MBS. I am assuming that I am bitten by the 4K sector misalignment issue, but my question is why were writes fast to begin with and now so slow? What may have technically happend during that reboot after copying data to the drive? Anyone have a clue? CommanderQ - Have you rebooted YOUR setup after you posted the success story and do you know if your -00S8B1's are 512 or 4K? TIA!

Hi ddomnick,

Sorry I haven't been replying more promptly, but I'm here now. :D I can definitely confirm that I've rebooted my NV+ several times now since the install. I never had any long delays when mine rebooted - if there were any delays, they were scheduled disk checks or other diagnostics or updates that I initiated. My drives are 4K models, though I haven't seen any write performance degradation.

I've recently been ripping whole DVDs to my NV+ (amounting to nearly 1TB) and noticed no problems with the transfers. I've seen both read and write performance in the range of 25MB/s+. That transfer was sustained whether I ripped the DVDs to my local hard drive and then copied them over (3 parallel copy operations), or if I ripped them directly to the storage server. I have noticed that smaller file groups write more slowly than they used to, but it always seems transient - it lasts only a few moments when it occurs, then the write performance picks back up.

Much like Coxy117, I'm a home user so my daily demands are relatively light, though I do like testing it from time to time with a lot of data transfers and video streaming to other rooms. It's quite possible that I'm not accessing it such that the problem is apparent - most of my files are large. The only consolation I can offer is that Netgear seems committed to resolving this, and if I figure out a solution (I'll keep tinkering to improve performance) I'll post it. :D