WD20EARS just added on the official HCL - mistake and issues

Coxy117 wrote:
UPDATE: installed RAIDiator 4.1.7-T29 beta as per CommanderQ's excellent post, and it seems to have done the trick. I'd still value the opinion of the forums as to whether its worth my doing the WDIDLE3 update, bearing in mind I'm a home user who is only using my NAS to store and access music, photos and digital music production files rather than heavy business usage. Ta.

Hi Coxy117,

I'm largely in the same category as you are - my NV+ is for home use (music, video, pictures, etc.), though I do exercise it pretty well with the video part. :) I can throw in some information from Western Digital on the WDIDLE3 utility and the underlying power-saving issue, though. I looked into it pretty thoroughly in making my original post, though I didn't mention this particular part.

In Western Digital's support articles related to this, they state that the "Idle 3" mode is for power saving. This is the mode that results in the Load Cycle Count increasing every time it enters and leaves this "Idle 3" mode (parking / unloading the drive heads). Unfortunately, when I was observing my NV+ before I used the WDIDLE3 utility, even when not in use, the drives continue to wake up (fairly frequently) from this mode, incrementing the Load Cycle Count.

Here's the fun part that's a mere mention in Western Digital's support articles - in cases like this (i.e. Linux) where the drive is continuously allowed to enter "Idle 3" mode to save power and then awakened a short time later, the power savings are effectively negated. While Western Digital is also quick to point out that upwards of 1 million Load Cycles are expected and supported by their drives, the power saving intentions are never realized. In essence, since we can't achieve any notable power savings until Netgear (or one of us clever persons :D ) resolves this power-saving issue, all we're doing is increasing our LCC values for no gain.

My suggestion to you would be to run the WDIDLE3 utility on the drives, if it's convenient or reasonably possible, just to stop that value if you have any concern or just don't like large, increasing values. :) There's no particular reason to leave it enabled since there's no benefit (yet). However, Western Digital has designed the drive to handle a lot of those cycles, so there's no pressing need to run the utility if you don't have a suitable PC handy. Their statement is that the drives are perfectly fine, even in this scenario, and there's no reason to doubt them, since their statement in their knowledge base means that they will support the drive if excessive Load Cycles are the reason a drive failed.

It's a toss-up and your preference, in the end. Personally, I'll disable it for now and enable it when I can get some power savings. :)

Just wanted to post my experience with this issue. I have an NV+ with 4 500Gb drives nearly to capacity. I bought 4 WD20EARS because they were on the HCL. Slotted the first and it initialized and synced just fine without a hiccup.

Popped in the second disk and got the horrible "the disk could not be used" error. I thought maybe the disk was bad so I tried another one and got the same thing. I then put one of the 500Gb drives back in and let it sync to get back to fully redundant while I piece together the problem.

After much reading I finally found this thread and it was a life saver. I installed 4.1.7 T29 beta firmware, rebooted, then hotplugged one of the new 2Tb drives. It started initializing right away. I did not need to do a factory reset and did not run any WD utilities.

Thanks everyone for posting all this great info!

@Coxy117 I would read up about WDidle3 and make your own decision but I have done this with older drives and it does solve the LCC issue.
Even though plenty of people say the WD are good for 1 million LLC their own spec sheets state 300,000 only.
for further reading links. viewtopic.php?p=233472#p233472

Installed two of these drives and have had nothing but problems. Rather than play the games necessary to see if I can make a compatibility I just tossed the two POS 2TB EARS and dropped in 2TB Seagate normal sectored drives and all is well.

And that's the easiest fix to this issue.

Why Netgear set them to the HCL is beyond me.

Take those POS drives off the HCL until WD changes their method of sector designation. The same model number with a different extension is insane. Like we can tell when we are ordering these POS drives.

Not that Netgear listens to us. :neener:

derektadman wrote:
Take those ... drives off the HCL until WD changes their method of sector designation.

4k secotrs are needed for >2TB disks. NetGear is working on a fix. There's already a fix in 4.2.12 beta and at some point there'll be one for Sparc as well.

Well some news for you all is that I have just gone through the whole 4KB sector alignment that involves removing and re-inserting each HDD one at a time then wait for rebuild then reboot and repeat again x 6 with firmware 4.1.12:T9 installed and it looks to have completed slowly but without a hitch so far.
I will update after further testing, but it seems faster already. BRB

Hi everybody
I am having the same problems with these drives my duo is only 4 weeks old and i decided to take the plunge upto higher capacity drives
luckily the new drives i recieved are the correct ones listed in the compatability list but after 2 days of use one of my drives was listed as almost dead.
I am currently using my duo in flex raid configuration and using Raidar 4.3.0 at this moment in time i only have 1 disk in use.
my duo was set up with an older version of raidar and firmware 4.1.6 / which is currently in use
will updating to raidiator 4.1.7-T42 allow me use my other disk??


Model: WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1
Serial: WD-WCAVY3645801
Firmware: 80.00A80

SMART Attribute

Raw Read Error Rate 0
Spin Up Time 8166
Start Stop Count 30
Reallocated Sector Count 0
Seek Error Rate 0
Power On Hours 77
Spin Retry Count 0
Calibration Retry Count 0
Power Cycle Count 12
Power-Off Retract Count 11
Load Cycle Count 3501
Temperature Celsius 38
Reallocated Event Count 0
Current Pending Sector 0
Offline Uncorrectable 0
UDMA CRC Error Count 0
Multi Zone Error Rate 0

ATA Error Count 102

Extended Attribute

Hot-add events 0
Hot-remove events 0
Lp stat events 132
Power glitches 0
Hard disk resets 0
Retries 0

i have contacted netgear regarding this issue and i am waitin on a reply over the last 48 hours my load cycle cout has increased by approx 1000 per day
i will keep you posted on the outcome

The LCC is a known issue with the WD??eaRs models. http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic ... 24&t=40828
WDidle3 is known to rectify this issue to some peoples satisfaction.

There is a new version of the WD20EARS-00MVWB0 and its a 2TB with 3 x 666GB platters.

viewtopic.php?f=24&t=43030