WD20EARS-00MVWB0 - works with NV+ or not?

The magic 8-ball reveals: outlook uncertain

Yes. I would also love to know.

Just checked with the i-store today - they have WD20EARS-00MVWB0 which seams the latest model (manufactured January 2011), although there are reference on the web (http://vr-zone.com/articles/667gb-per-p ... 335-2.html) going back to July 2010!?

Reading that reference I am more inclind to get WD20EARS-00MVWB0 (if on HCL which seems to never be able to chatch up with drive manufacturers) - 3 platter drive may be more reliable and better perfoming.

I should add that I got my brand new NV+ four (empty) bays on 1/1/2011 with intentions to place 4x2GB WD drives, thinking any 2TB under 4.1.7 would be OK. It has been extremly frustrating experience for me to get my NV+ going.
In the process I managed to get the first two unit fail to boot at all after attempting to upgrade to 4.1.7 via TFTP and USB. I am having a bit more luck with the third unit - and imagine I've been in IT (somewhat different type) for many many years.

I never thought NV+ to be engineered to make life so hard - why would NV be so particular and precious about drives? cannot imagine having to do this kind of acrobatics placing any hard drive in any windows/linux pc? how difficult can the firmware process be? why this cannot be simply performed on the diskless unit (as I originally expected).

So far, I have an older 400GB drive installed, upgraded the unit to 4.1.7 installed additional HCL approved WD20EARS 00S8B1 to get usable just under 400GB across the two drives (as expected). I am unsure about the steps

Still not sure if am on on 512 or 4k sectors - is there a way to tell? I have done a factory default performed after upgrade via RAIDar/setup browser interface.
The plan is to get all 2TB drives and WD20EARS-00MVWB0 seems like a good choice.

It has been previously suggested that I am "fixated on WD".
<You seem to be fixated on the WD20EARS drives. Are these drives that you already have in hand?>
<If not, why not consider other makes/models? >

WD served me very well over many years, 100% reliable and at this stage, specially reading this forum, I believe I have considerable risk by introducing NV+ into the equasion.

Please understand I am really appreciative for advice provided on this forum ... as long as it's polite and not patronising -

zest

Under Status > Logs > Download all logs > extract zip contents, what does your partition.log look like?

copy of my partition.log below
Disk /dev/hde doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/hdc: 400.0 GB, 400077971456 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 48640 cylinders, total 781402288 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 32 4096031 2048000 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdc2 4096032 4608031 256000 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdc3 4608032 781385935 388388952 5 Extended
/dev/hdc5 4608040 781385935 388388948 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/hde: 2000.3 GB, 2000388448256 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243200 cylinders, total 3907008688 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

many thanks for decifering ... looks like it's still 512? so would I move it to 4k?

zest

You can see the start sectors (e.g. 32) are divisible by 8. It is aligned for 4k sectors. The tool just measures as if the sectors were 512 bytes.

so we all good. can I please ask you if the following approach is ok to insert more drives, having the 400GB and 2TB already in there -
1. insert another 2TB and sync
2. replace the 400GB with 2TB, (power down, remove 400GB, insert 2TB, power up, hope for the resync on the new 2TB)
3. inser the fourth 2TB to complete the set and resync

would you recommend any other action?

appreciate your expert addvice

... I might get to like my NV+

zest

That should work fine. You could replace the 2TB drive first if you wish though.

many many thanks.
I'll report results back in a day or two

zest

I don't know about the NV, but I can confirm the WD20EARS-OOMVWB0 does NOT work with the ReadyNAS Duo.
However it should be possible to use the jumper settings on the disk to alter it from 4k block to 512byte. Anyone tried this already?

I have just bought a NV+ which came supplied with firmware 4.1.6. I put the drives in and it all seemed to work fine.
The only problem I did encounter is when copying files from a win2k machine it would create a directory and then copy the file into it but report the share was longer available. It was as if after creating the directory it wasnt ready to be used immediately.

I wanted to upgrade to 4.1.7 anyway so I pulled the 2nd drive to stop the rebuild and then applied the firmware upgrade and let it boot afterwards. Then when I confirmed 4.1.7 was running I did a full factory reset and left it rebuilding overnight. This morning I started copying across 200GB from a usb drive using the win2k machine again without any problems.