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WD20EARS just added on the official HCL - mistake and issues
The official HCL has (quietly !) been updated for Sparc based machines with a 2TB WD desktop class drive: the WD20EARS (http://www.readynas.com/?page_id=82). This is in principle good news as the WD20EADS which might have been a candidate (if not discontinued in a near future) seems to have a lot a quality and compatibility issues.
But ... :
1) The HCL mentions the exact version to be used: WD20EARS-00R6B0. Googling the reference does not provide any answer (but the WD20EADS-00R6B0 which is well known). AFAIK, the current available version of the drive is the WD20EARS-00S8B1.
There should be an error in the HCL or the new entry is useless !
2) No restriction appears on the RAIDiator version to be used meaning by the way that the new 4K sector size, which implementation starts in high capacity drives such as the EARS, is fully supported since the beginning. It's amazing as other vendors have delivered updated firmwares for that specific purpose (and keep partitions aligned or performance may degrade significantly).
Or will the 4K sector size be supported by RAIDiator 4.1.7 as current beta "adds support for WD drives that don’t support TLER" (= WD desktop drives) ?
And does this new entry in the offical HCL mean that LCC issues are now fully tackled by RAIDiator 4.1.7 (since the EARS has the same green features as the EADS and WDIDLE is not supported by WD on newer drives), even though some users report recent WD firmwares do not count any more Intellipark related LCC in the Smart infos ?
Please Jedis clarify and thanks to still supporting early (Infrant ...) adopters !
Regards.
But ... :
1) The HCL mentions the exact version to be used: WD20EARS-00R6B0. Googling the reference does not provide any answer (but the WD20EADS-00R6B0 which is well known). AFAIK, the current available version of the drive is the WD20EARS-00S8B1.
There should be an error in the HCL or the new entry is useless !
2) No restriction appears on the RAIDiator version to be used meaning by the way that the new 4K sector size, which implementation starts in high capacity drives such as the EARS, is fully supported since the beginning. It's amazing as other vendors have delivered updated firmwares for that specific purpose (and keep partitions aligned or performance may degrade significantly).
Or will the 4K sector size be supported by RAIDiator 4.1.7 as current beta "adds support for WD drives that don’t support TLER" (= WD desktop drives) ?
And does this new entry in the offical HCL mean that LCC issues are now fully tackled by RAIDiator 4.1.7 (since the EARS has the same green features as the EADS and WDIDLE is not supported by WD on newer drives), even though some users report recent WD firmwares do not count any more Intellipark related LCC in the Smart infos ?
Please Jedis clarify and thanks to still supporting early (Infrant ...) adopters !
Regards.
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- It took me a little searching to find it, too. ;-) You can get to it using this link: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=39470. Hopefully your upgrade goes as well as mine. :-)
- Just wanted to post my progress thus far.
I have two brand new 2TB EARS drives. I downloaded the WDIDLE3 utility, powered down my computer, opened my computer case, disconnected existing drives and hooked up one EARS, ran the utility with the /S300 extension and it registered the change. Repeated with the 2nd drive. Then installed one drive in the NV+ and ran through the setup wizard and downloaded the 4.1.7 beta firmware. The drive had 12 SMART errors at this point but no increase over the next few hours. Once everything was done initializing I powered the NV+ down and inserted the 2nd drive. It started the sync process and that's where I left it last night. Will post LCC and SMART errors in the next few days, but so far so good.
Thanks again to CommanderQ. - Ok, just checked and the array is fully redundant after 27h.
Disk 1: LCC 7, SMART errors: still at 12
Disk 2: LCC 8, SMART errors: 0 - Does any one of you have the ReadyNAS spin down option enabled?
- I have an NV+ with 256 MB of RAM and a single WD20EADS. I am thinking about simply adding a WD20EARS to this and I know it may or may not work, so I will be backing everything up prior to this. Before I try this, I will also be running WDIDLE3 /S300. I suppose I will leave TLER at whatever setting is default for both of the drives.
On a side note, I have had the WD20EADS for close to a year with only the issue of the LCC increasing a lot. It's at about 50,000 now. I havn't run WDIDLE3. I'll probably be doing that soon. I have had no issues with it other than that. - TLER is just an extra step you can take to prevent the controller from thinking the drive is dead/dying while the drive goes into extended recovery. It only kicks in WHEN the drive develops a bad sector. (more often than you'd think, its usually transparent)
If you don't run TLER, and you get a report of a dead drive.....don't worry. Just power the ReadyNAS off, and back on again. The drive will, in all likelihood show up green. If it doesn't, then the drive really did die. :) - Like others on this forum, I recently purchased a pair of WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1 to go with my new ReadyNAS Duo (I previously had a reliable D Link DNS-323 but the 500Gb storage was getting tight and I wanted the Squeezebox functionality of the ReadyNAS). I diligently checked the HCL before purchasing: the 2Tb beauties were listed. Since installing the system, I've had pretty much the same experience as others here - repeated ATA error count notifications, plus a steadily increasing Load Cycle Count (had the disks 3 days and they're each at 1957 and 1658 respectively. In addition, the UPnP streaming performance from the Duo to my PS3 was decidedly under par.
To cut a long story short, my ATA error count woes seem to have been solved through an upgrade to the T29 beta firmware. This also seems to have improved the streaming performance. However, having read everything on this thread, and others, including CommanderQ's really helpful post, it seems I need to take action via WD's WDIDLE3 utility. The snag is that I've recently disposed of my Windows PC, and have only a windows laptop and a Macbook available from which to undertake the firmware tweak. Has anyone experience of running WDIDLE3 successfully with a hard drive plugged in via a caddy and USB connection either from Windows run under Virtualbox on MacOS or via a Windows XP laptop?
Thanks in advance! - I don't believe you can run WDIDLE3 over a USB connection. Although I did try it with my Windows laptop. If you get it to work, let me know :-)
BTW, if you search around you can find comments from WD that the LCC count isn't a concern. I posted a link on some thread here. But of course there is a lot of talk on the intertubes about it. However write performance is quite poor with my Duo and apparently the 4K sector size on the this model of WD20EARS is the cause. Netgear posted they will update the firmware but no info on when and apparently the x86 code base will be fixed first. - After much trouble, I managed to get a bootable DOS USB stick. but the big catch is getting the drive to show up in DOS. Yes it has to be in DOS. the utility is quite vocal if run from windows (big warnings, danger). To my knowledge, there's no easy way to use it through USB. I had trouble even via eSATA, but eventually got it to recognize on one of my systems, but not on my laptop.
So, in conclusion, running the WDIDLE tool is a great idea. But quite a challenge on modern PCs, and impossible in a Mac house. - 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!
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