WD replaced my TLER-enabled drive with one that won't enable TLER

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Fangs404

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I run a RAID-5 setup with my Thecus N4100Pro NAS. I have 4 Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black drives (WD1001FALS). I bought all 4 pretty soon after the line came out, and I was able to enable TLER on all 4 drives. The RAID array has been great for about 2 years, but about 2 weeks ago, one of the drives died on me. I did an RMA through WD and got a replacement drive only to realize that I couldn't enable TLER on it. I had a long conversation via their support website ranting to WD about how I need a TLER-enabled WD1001FALS, but they just blew me off.

Anyway, I figured I'd try it, but as I expected the RAID rebuild wouldn't even get to 4% complete before the drive would drop out. Then, the replacement drive actually started throwing SMART errors, too, so I had to replace it. The 2nd replacement arrived today, and as I expected, it also won't support TLER.

My plan is to not even try to go through the rebuild process. I want to sell the replacement drive since it's brand new and pick up a drive that I know will work. Now, I know that the RE line is designed specifically for RAID and supports TLER out of the box. But I also saw the price tag.

So my question is this: what drive(s) do you guys recommend I replace my WD1001FALS with? I'm also not opposed to picking up 4 1.5TB or 2TB drives and growing the RAID.

Thanks!
 
i ran 8 of them on areca in raid 6 without changing any settings
 
Fangs404 said:
Does it support TLER out of the box, or would I need to run some Hitachi equivalent of WDTLER?
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TLER irrelevant w/ Hitachi drives. You're good to go out of the box for striped arrays (hardware RAID, ZFS, etc).
 
The same exact thing happened to me... after fighting with them they eventually agreed to replace all 5 of my wd10eads drives with 1tb re3 drives..
 
tojoski said:
The same exact thing happened to me... after fighting with them they eventually agreed to replace all 5 of my wd10eads drives with 1tb re3 drives..
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I just got kinda worn down by their resistance. I don't want to support a company that is that resistant to helping a customer.

I just bought 4 7K3000 drives which are on sale for $99 a pop on Newegg with promo code EMCKHKG39! Hell of a deal. I should be able to recoup a decent chunk of that when I go to sell my current drives.

Thanks for the help guys!
 
Indeed, I've been running an array of 6 7k2000 drives on a RocketRAID 4320 in a RAID-6 configuration since July, 2010 and they've been working wonderfully. Didnt have to do anything to them out of the box, although I did upgrade their firmware from JKAOA28A to JKAOA3EA using their jkdl_sp.exe tool (not required, but why not start off with the latest firmware?).

I, too, am in the same situation as you are. I have an array of 10 WD20EADs drives, all of which have TLER enabled and Intellipark disabled (or maxed out), and had no issues at all for the past 1.5 years or so until one of them died just a few weeks ago. So I RMAd it and last night at my doorstep arrived a WD20EARS! Argh!

So now I'm thinking of building a new array entirely of 7K3000 drives and selling all of my WD20EADs drives to someone who needs replacements for their existing array.

I used the 7K2000, not the 7k3000, so let us know how the array builds with the 7k3000s!
 
It's funny how consumer grade (non-RAID) drives from other companies have no issues running in RAID arrays, but the WD drives basically don't work unless you can disable TLER. There's no way those drives are getting Unrecoverable Bit Errors at that rate at which people have them drop from arrays, so it can only mean they're intentionally sabotaging the drives to make them not work in RAID.

Way to go WD!
 
I don't think hard drives have any way to determine if they are in a RAID or not. The controller (or RAID software) is the only part that knows.
 
It's funny how consumer grade (non-RAID) drives from other companies have no issues running in RAID arrays, but the WD drives basically don't work unless you can disable TLER.
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It's just a ploy to push you into the Enterprise drives but it just pushed me into another brand. :)

I guess they pushed me a little too far? :D
 
GeorgeHR said:
I don't think hard drives have any way to determine if they are in a RAID or not. The controller (or RAID software) is the only part that knows.
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The drive doesn't need to know it's in RAID. WD just needs to make the firmware respond slowly randomly at fairly large intervals. In a non RAID application you probably wouldn't notice, or you'd have a few second pause while accessing it, but in RAID application the drive gets dropped from the array.
 
unwire said:
Indeed, I've been running an array of 6 7k2000 drives on a RocketRAID 4320 in a RAID-6 configuration since July, 2010 and they've been working wonderfully. Didnt have to do anything to them out of the box, although I did upgrade their firmware from JKAOA28A to JKAOA3EA using their jkdl_sp.exe tool (not required, but why not start off with the latest firmware?).

I, too, am in the same situation as you are. I have an array of 10 WD20EADs drives, all of which have TLER enabled and Intellipark disabled (or maxed out), and had no issues at all for the past 1.5 years or so until one of them died just a few weeks ago. So I RMAd it and last night at my doorstep arrived a WD20EARS! Argh!

So now I'm thinking of building a new array entirely of 7K3000 drives and selling all of my WD20EADs drives to someone who needs replacements for their existing array.

I used the 7K2000, not the 7k3000, so let us know how the array builds with the 7k3000s!
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Did you have to contact Hitachi support for the firmware upgrade?

And once I get this all running, I'll definitely let you guys know how it goes!
 
So I've replaced all 4 WD drives in my RAID-5 with 4 2TB Hitachi 7K3000 drives, and I'm very happy. All 4 are working perfectly! And at $99 a pop with a promo code on Newegg, it's almost impossible to beat that performance at that price.
 
Fangs404 said:
Did you have to contact Hitachi support for the firmware upgrade?
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All firmware upgrades for North America are handled by one person, who doesn't seem to be in a hurry to reply to customers, taking 60 days to deliver the 3MA firmware update for my 7K1000.C.
 
larrymoencurly said:
All firmware upgrades for North America are handled by one person, who doesn't seem to be in a hurry to reply to customers, taking 60 days to deliver the 3MA firmware update for my 7K1000.C.
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The updates are available from 3rd parties on the web for 1000K.c, they work fine, took me less than 90mins to find update and update 5 drives.
 
To be honest I dont remember where I got it! If it was off the Hitachi site, or if they sent it to me directly. There was no particular reason that I upgraded them, other than that I wanted them to have the latest firmware before adding them to my array.

The files are:JKDL_SP.EXE and JK0NB3EA.BDX.

Here are a few screenshots of the upgrade process.

2isbocm.jpg


15cy9i1.jpg
 
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