[urbanriot]

I'm hoping someone has some advice as I'd really like to transfer a pile of data to a larger array...

6 x Western Digital WD30EZRX Green drives in RAID5 configuration jumpered for 3 GB/s
Connected to Adaptec 6405 with latest 19076 firmware
Drives plugged into Intel expander AXX6DRXEXP with latest 2.18 firmware
(listed in Adaptec Compatibility Report - http://download.adap...-12_series6.pdf)

I create my array, create a partition, start copying and things are fine... a half hour or an hour goes by and the system jams up and I can barely click anything. On the hot swap bay, one drive has a solid green light and I can possibly click continually on applications to try and shut down, then after waiting a good half hour I pull the plug. This has happened four times now.

Previously I had the same model drives plugged into this card with a four drive multilane cable without an expander and there were no issues.

I swapped out the expander with an identical one and I have the same issue.

The card or drives are well within 'normal' temperatures.

Does anyone have any advice? Thanks in advance!

This post has been edited by urbanriot: 25 November 2012 - 09:43 PM

[Luis4]

Hello,

My name is Luis and I'm with Adaptec Technical Support.
WD green drives are part of the WD desktop class drives and are not recommended for use with Enterprise RAID or with Hotswap enclosures by Western Digital. If you go to the WD knowledge base and search for answer id 1397, you will see an explanation of the condition that can occur while using these drives in a RAID. These drives tend to time out and cause o/s problems and can also false fail in an array, causing array to go degraded or failed.

Here is the disclaimer WD offers for these drives: Business Critical RAID Environments – WD Caviar Green Hard Drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or
expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD’s
Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24x7 RAID applications, and include features like
enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing.


If you have additional questions, please contact our support dept. at 408-934-7274

Thank you

[urbanriot]

Luis, your response doesn't contribute to resolving my issue as I'm well aware, like the plethora of other people successfully utilizing WD Green drives in a RAID configuration for home servers, of TLER and WDIDLE and all the other little nuances of using consumer level drives in 'enterprise' configurations.

Your post reads more of a shill for Western Digital's higher priced drives rather than a technical response from an employee of Adaptec with technical insight.

If you have technical insight, perhaps you could tell me if a drive with a higher TLER setting hitting a high latency or bad sector would cause the controller to behave exactly as I illustrated, 'jamming up' the card entirely and breaking all RAID arrays. I know, based on experience, that LSI based cards do not behave in a similar fashion when they hit a bad spot, they simply drop the drive out of the array (and sometimes take your array offline).