[fear]

cbass98, on 01 October 2010 - 02:45 AM, said:

So I took it upon myself to test the WD20EARS drives myself on a 9650SE-16ML card. First, some background may help. I had 16 WD 1TB green drives running fine in the RAID6 array for about 2 years. I kept the machine on 24/7 and for the most part, had no problems with the green drives. One drive squealed if it was on for too long. Another drive kept being degraded because it had ECC errors. But those issues were attributable to the specific drives and not the RAID card. By the way, I did enable them all with TLER.

So anyhow, I bought 12 of the WD20EARS drives. I used 7 of them to copy 2TB of data to temporarily. I did not jumper because I was using W7 x64. Then I took down the raid array. Then copied the data back from the 7x2TB drives to 14 individual 1TB drives. Now this is where it got interesting. I then proceeded to use WD's tool to zero out the 7 2TB drives. I think 3 of them zero'ed out just fine. The other 4 had some bad sectors on them that made the WD tool hiccup. (Quick aside - WD really needs to update their tool to allow skipping of bad sectors. I'll leave the PC on for 5 hours, come back, and realize the program was waiting for me to push YES to continue. Terrible.) Anyhow, the 4 eventually did zero out just fine once I skipped a couple of bad sectors.

After zero'ing out the 7 drives, I then jumpered all 12 of them because I didn't want to even take a chance with the 4K sectors in the 3ware RAID card. I also ran the WDIDLE and set each drive to 300 seconds. I then proceeded to plug all 12 drives into the 3WARE RAID card and create a new RAID6 unit. It took overnight to complete, but in the morning, one of the drives was in a degraded state (1 of the bad 7 drives). I pulled the drive and then ran WD's SMART test on it, to which it failed. So now I'm in the process of RMA'ing that drive. Although the array was in a degraded state because of the missing drive, it was still usable. The WD advanced RMA was going to take a while, so I decided to redo the array with just 11 drives and use the 12th drive as a spare. I'm happy to report that the other 11 drives have been working fine for almost a week on the RAID array running 24/7.

Verdict - The WD20EARS drives DO WORK in the 9650SE RAID card. I only tested them jumpered, but why risk not jumpering them?

I'll report back in a month or so to let you all know if any of the drives fall out of the array. I had done a lot of internet research before I bought the drives, and I believe I'm the only one so far that has tested [and reported] that the drives do work on the 3ware card. I remember talking to 3rd level LSI support just a month ago, and he briefly mentioned that they tried it and had to send all the drives back (I didn't ask him why at the time). Then I emailed him a couple of weeks later, when I was about to buy the drives, and he told me they hadn't even tested the drives. Go figure. So anyway, I'm glad the drives worked out, but I'd still like to give a special middle finger to LSI for not testing this out themselves and letting the consumers having to fend for themselves. This will be the last 3ware/LSI product that I'll ever own.

Hey there. So what's your experience so far ? Please, share it. I'm about the buy 8 pieces of WD20EARS for a raid5 archive.

[sys-eng]

cbass98, on 17 August 2010 - 06:14 PM, said:

Thanks Brian. But jeez, the drive has been out for 6 months already. How is it a RAID storage company as big as 3ware/LSI can't buy a couple of the drives and test them out? They have to realize consumers use their 3ware cards, and we'll most likely use consumer-focused desktop drives.

That is exactly why consumers should rely upon the tested & approved lists developed by the Raid controller makers. Most consumers hardly know what RAID stands for and not a clue about the interaction of the controller and disk drive. Many people buy RAID controllers to increase reliability of the system and protection of data. Keeping a list of approved drives up to date is a major challenge because the disk drive makers are in a race to build the cheapest drives rather than the best. It has become all about the most capacity for the lowest price and reliability has suffered. I would like to see the disk drive manufacturers perform the tests to indicate which of their drives are suitable for RAID. The average consumer would probably be surprised at how few drives are made to that standard.

This post has been edited by sys-eng: 15 November 2010 - 06:19 PM

[jpiszcz]

Thanks for letting everyone know!
Have you had any further issues?

[Velocityraptor]

hi folks,

I just created a 16tb raid 6 with my 3ware 9650SE-8LP and 8x WD20EARS
Works flawlessly up to now, though I did not jumper them
My generic intention was to expand my old 8x 1tb array by replacing only one drive at a time and rebuilding the array afterwards (takes almost two days until it´s finished!).

But as it seems you can´t expand the array to the theoretically available 16 tb after this procedure - you just have an 8tb array on 8x 2tb drives ! :-(
qnap nas appliances support this very handy feature since ages - did i miss something or is 3ware to be blamed ?????
Thanx a billion in advance for your precious advice !

[compwizrd]

Velocityraptor, on 27 November 2010 - 09:08 AM, said:

But as it seems you can´t expand the array to the theoretically available 16 tb after this procedure - you just have an 8tb array on 8x 2tb drives ! :-(

Contact 3ware.. somewhere in their manual/documentation it states to do so.. They have a utility to expand it like that.. I think you have to send them a certain output, and they create a matching file and send it back to you.

Try not to mention WD20EARS

[Velocityraptor]

compwizrd, on 28 November 2010 - 01:39 PM, said:

Contact 3ware.. somewhere in their manual/documentation it states to do so.. They have a utility to expand it like that.. I think you have to send them a certain output, and they create a matching file and send it back to you.

Try not to mention WD20EARS

Hey,
thanks for this cool hint !
Seems I was too impatient...
In the meantime I updated my backup drives, deleted the array and created a new 8x 2TB Raid 6
AFAIK this is the absolute maximum you can do with a 9650SE-8LP (unless 3ware / LSI offer a new firmware exceeding the nasty no-more-than-2TB-per-drive limit. Not really a problem with a 64bit OS, but a big one with a still 32bit based BIOS... ;-)
Or did anyone manage to run a 2.5 or 3TB drive on a 9650SE ???
Adaptec series 5 users are better off - world is unfair ! :-)

[mejv]

Velocityraptor, on 28 November 2010 - 04:46 PM, said:

Hey,
thanks for this cool hint !
Seems I was too impatient...
In the meantime I updated my backup drives, deleted the array and created a new 8x 2TB Raid 6
AFAIK this is the absolute maximum you can do with a 9650SE-8LP (unless 3ware / LSI offer a new firmware exceeding the nasty no-more-than-2TB-per-drive limit. Not really a problem with a 64bit OS, but a big one with a still 32bit based BIOS... ;-)
Or did anyone manage to run a 2.5 or 3TB drive on a 9650SE ???
Adaptec series 5 users are better off - world is unfair ! :-)

I thought the latest beta firmware from 3ware (v4.10.00.019 November 2010) had some notes about >2TB drive support...
http://www.lsi.com/c..._8ml/index.html

Anyone tried it?

MEJV

[compwizrd]

mejv, on 29 November 2010 - 12:54 PM, said:

I thought the latest beta firmware from 3ware (v4.10.00.019 November 2010) had some notes about >2TB drive support...
http://www.lsi.com/c..._8ml/index.html

That looks like it's for the 9750 only, which wouldn't surprise me, as the 9650's are nearly EOL.

[Velocityraptor]

Righty right, the latest updates seem to be for the 9750 - which design-wise does not have much in common with the 9650 as ist seems (e.g. no dedicated Power PC RISC processor)
Just in case: does this thing really grant backward compatibility ? Anyone out there who successfully moved a Raid array from a 9650 to a 9750 ???

[mejv]

A 3ware connection indicated that the >2TB changes was implemented for 9650/9690 after the 9.5.3 release, in the beta code due to lack of >2TB drive availability...

Any one tried the beta code 4.10.00.019 with >2 TB drives?

MEJV