[jpiszcz]

Michal Soltys, on Sep 29 2009, 03:42 AM, said:

6_6_6, on Sep 12 2009, 07:59 PM, said:

Hmm... Interesting situation.

What would you choose if you had only 2 options?

1. Get Seagate and pray the servers do not crash.

2. Get WD and power cycle the servers every 49 days.

I'd buy HGST drives - which I started doing recently, whenever I need a new one.

I have have had no issues with RE3s.

[raubvogel]

Any hint to persuade them to give the firmware upgrade? Just came out of a phone call with their tier2 people and, to put in a good way, it was not particularly productive call.

[jpiszcz]

raubvogel, on Sep 30 2009, 04:39 PM, said:

Any hint to persuade them to give the firmware upgrade? Just came out of a phone call with their tier2 people and, to put in a good way, it was not particularly productive call.

The firmware was posted here (a link to it) - it is the same file as the official firmware that the previous person used.

[jpiszcz]

jpiszcz, on Sep 30 2009, 04:48 PM, said:

raubvogel, on Sep 30 2009, 04:39 PM, said:

Any hint to persuade them to give the firmware upgrade? Just came out of a phone call with their tier2 people and, to put in a good way, it was not particularly productive call.

The firmware was posted here (a link to it) - it is the same file as the official firmware that the previous person used.

It was posted here:
http://www.hardforum...hp?p=1034692197

Which points to here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?imzyjmumrjm

Which points to here:
http://download171.mediafire.com/phxajwtyt...rjm/0404V02.exe

The MD5SUM matches the official firmware that someone sent me.

5135d00cf39dc1b89164c7027a685aed 0404V02.exe
5135d00cf39dc1b89164c7027a685aed 0404V02.exe *official

[jpiszcz]

The PDF not included in that link says:

WD VelociRaptor® Hard Drives
Firmware change

Dear Valued WD Customer:
As a result of product evaluation consistent with Western Digital's quality
systems and our commitment to provide the highest quality products, an
update is being made to the WD VelociRaptor product family.

Description of Change:
Performance enhancement: Sequential read and write
Compatibility enhancements: Double status FIS
TLER timer and counter synchronization
These changes do not affect the form or fit of the drive but do positively
affect the function of the drive.

Details of Firmware Changes:
Performance improvements to sequential read and write:
Firmware release includes a function to allow the drive to stay in the
sequential mode if there was no other activity. This particularly benefits
certain SATA RAID environments.

Current Model Numbers Current Firmware Revision
WD3000BLFS-01YBU0
WD1500BLFS-01YBU0
WD740BLFS-01YBU0
WD3000HLFS-01G6U0
WD1500HLFS-01G6U0
WD740HLFS-01G6U0
04.04V01
04.04V01
04.04V01
04.04V01
04.04V01
04.04V01

New Model Numbers New Firmware Revision
WD3000BLFS-01YBU1
WD1500BLFS-01YBU1
WD740BLFS-01YBU1
WD3000HLFS-01G6U1
WD1500HLFS-01G6U1
WD740HLFS-01G6U1
04.04V02
04.04V02
04.04V02
04.04V02
04.04V02
04.04V02

Double status FIS:
The drive sent two status FIS (C001h and 5001h) after COMRESET.
Although the drive behavior did not violate the SATA specification it still
created issues for some SATA host bus adapters. This firmware will only
post 5001h when the drive is ready.

TLER:
Corrected an issue where after 49 days of continuous operation the drive
could falsely report an error to the Host. This issue does not result in data
loss and only occurs once every 49 days of continuous operation and only
if a read/write operation is in progress when the counter rolls to zero. The
new firmware resolves this issue but as an alternate workaround, the drive
can be power cycled before 49 days elapses to avoid the potential error.

Field Update Utility/Binary available July 24, 2009.

Manufacturing Implementation Date: August 21, 2009

Please contact your Western Digital representative for any questions
regarding this Product Change Notification.

[VincentsMusic]

I'm having a really strange problem. I had two of the 2.5" VelociRaptors that that I received as an RMA replacement about a year ago. They were set as a two drive RAID 0 RAID for use with a Mac. They worked fine, but then out of nowhere they wouldn't spin up, but instead made this weird two tone sound. I received 2 drives as a replacement. This time I set them up to use them as individual drives. They worked fine for several days. Today I was using them, then unmounted them from the Mac Desktop with the Eject command. When I tried to mount them again they wouldn't spin up and instead I got the same, strange two tone sound. So in a matter of minutes I went from having two perfectly working drives to two dead drives that won't spin up. The two tone sound is really strange. It sounds like it could be some kind of diagnostic tone, but the WD guys in tech support didn't know anything about it. Anyone else experience this? In my case I've only used these for several days, so it wouldn't be the 49 day bug that others were talking about. Thanks!

[Gr1nch]

I too went through the same crap with my 5 drives.
First, I was told the firmware update was taken off of their website because it didn't fix the issue or the entire issue or something. I was furthermore told that what they want customers to do is RMA the drives and they will send them new drives that have the update already installed on them with the issue fixed. So, after advanced RMA'ing, I realized a week later that not all the money was put on hold for Drive X 5, so I called. I find out that the 4/5 RMAs "didn't go through" even though I used identical information for all of them outside of the differing serial numbers.

Next, when getting the RMAs fixed I was told that actually the support person "had a concern that RMAing is not going to fix the problem". This was followed with, "we have no known issues with these drives at all, so I don't see how RMAing them is going to do anything." This was aside from also being told that "we don't have any of these actually in our warehouse so it will be at least 7-10 days before we even get any more in and then can send them to you".

So he passes me to tier 2 (another 30 minute hold). Tier 2 again says, "we have no known issues with this drive model. Further more, we do not release firmware updates ever for our raid class drives!". Finally, "we recommend you run our diagnostics as it may not even be your drives causing it". Talk about taking 5 fricken steps backwards. I explained to him the article, quoting their own words provided above about the problem. The reply was "well there are no issues with these drives and you can find forum articles just about anywhere about any hardware and it doesn't really mean anything". So, he bottom lined it to me, saying he would RMA is thats what I want but it won't fix anything.

I said I was very frustrated that he would not even listen to the issue described in my research or believe there may be a known issue he just doesn't see. He finally agreed to let me send him the links to the articles and said he'd call me back. An hour later, I call in and at tier 2 I hear that he had left for the day, so I ordered the advanced RMA, being told the same thing from this person, and had 5xdrive price held off my card. An hour after that, I suddenly get an email from the engineer that I was told had left with the same content as is posted above and the firmware update.
My last problem is the update has been running about an hour now with only 2 of my 5 drives connected and it still hasn't come back. I booted off cd to mini-xp and ran it. ntvdm.exe is at 98-100%. Of course I'm very concerned I can't just restart even if I can try getting a more barebones DOS boot, which I wish I did now. I'm just hoping its working. The hard drive light is blinking at a someone normal pace...

Anyone else know how long the firmware update utility took to run or the likelihood after another hour that I'll perm dmg the drive restarting?

[jpiszcz]

Gr1nch, on Dec 9 2009, 06:15 AM, said:

I too went through the same crap with my 5 drives.
First, I was told the firmware update was taken off of their website because it didn't fix the issue or the entire issue or something. I was furthermore told that what they want customers to do is RMA the drives and they will send them new drives that have the update already installed on them with the issue fixed. So, after advanced RMA'ing, I realized a week later that not all the money was put on hold for Drive X 5, so I called. I find out that the 4/5 RMAs "didn't go through" even though I used identical information for all of them outside of the differing serial numbers.

Next, when getting the RMAs fixed I was told that actually the support person "had a concern that RMAing is not going to fix the problem". This was followed with, "we have no known issues with these drives at all, so I don't see how RMAing them is going to do anything." This was aside from also being told that "we don't have any of these actually in our warehouse so it will be at least 7-10 days before we even get any more in and then can send them to you".

So he passes me to tier 2 (another 30 minute hold). Tier 2 again says, "we have no known issues with this drive model. Further more, we do not release firmware updates ever for our raid class drives!". Finally, "we recommend you run our diagnostics as it may not even be your drives causing it". Talk about taking 5 fricken steps backwards. I explained to him the article, quoting their own words provided above about the problem. The reply was "well there are no issues with these drives and you can find forum articles just about anywhere about any hardware and it doesn't really mean anything". So, he bottom lined it to me, saying he would RMA is thats what I want but it won't fix anything.

I said I was very frustrated that he would not even listen to the issue described in my research or believe there may be a known issue he just doesn't see. He finally agreed to let me send him the links to the articles and said he'd call me back. An hour later, I call in and at tier 2 I hear that he had left for the day, so I ordered the advanced RMA, being told the same thing from this person, and had 5xdrive price held off my card. An hour after that, I suddenly get an email from the engineer that I was told had left with the same content as is posted above and the firmware update.
My last problem is the update has been running about an hour now with only 2 of my 5 drives connected and it still hasn't come back. I booted off cd to mini-xp and ran it. ntvdm.exe is at 98-100%. Of course I'm very concerned I can't just restart even if I can try getting a more barebones DOS boot, which I wish I did now. I'm just hoping its working. The hard drive light is blinking at a someone normal pace...

Anyone else know how long the firmware update utility took to run or the likelihood after another hour that I'll perm dmg the drive restarting?

Hi,

When I ran it on my 12 drives, each drive took about 10-30 seconds (for the ones that worked). I used the old DOS boot-disk based firmware update method, but again, FYI, it only worked on a few of the drives.

What a waste of time, dealing with all of these issues and it is somewhat irritating WD does not have an official stance on the issue.

[6_6_6]

Gr1nch, on Dec 9 2009, 05:15 AM, said:

Anyone else know how long the firmware update utility took to run or the likelihood after another hour that I'll perm dmg the drive restarting?

Sorry for your troubles. I haven't seen any firmware update taking more than a minute on anything. They are very small.

[Michal Soltys]

jpiszcz, on Dec 9 2009, 02:21 PM, said:

What a waste of time, dealing with all of these issues and it is somewhat irritating WD does not have an official stance on the issue.

Well, I'd guess their official stance is that the problem doesn't exist Unless it gets /really/ public and ugly, I'm sure it will stay this way...