WD Green drive dropped out of raid. can i reuse ?

Scotspaul

Scotspaul

Scotspaul

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I recently bought a WD10EARS drive to put in raid 1 with an older WD green 1tb drive i have had for 2-3 years. I wanted to have security as i expected the older drive to fail eventually.
The newer drive has dropped out of raid, and no i wasn't aware they are not suitable for raid till it failed and i did research. Anyway, i have broken the array, and was going to settle for two seperate drives but i cant get the newer drive to show up any more ( i have reset the bios to ahci instead of raid). The older drive has been picked up, (and all my other non-raid drives), but not the other. Have i completely broken the newer drive? its only a few weeks old. :(
 
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This was took from another site so dont know how reliable the info is

Our only Green drives that are RAID compatible are Models: WD2002FYPS, WD1000FYPS, WD7500AYPS, and WD5000ABPS. None of the Caviar Green drives, including the EARS drives are RAID compatible. That's why they will continue to fall out of the RAID arrays.
 
IIUC, the reason the WD EARS (etc.) drives aren't suitable for RAID is that if they get a bad block then they can spend a long time trying to recover, resulting in the disk dropping out of the array. The RAID-compatible ones have "Time Limited Error Recovery" which give up trying quicker.

If the disk doesn't show up in the bios any more then try on another port/cable and check it's powered ok. If that doesn't work then it's probably dead, otherwise I'd suggest running WD's diagnostics and checking the SMART data.
 
WD have dropped a bit of a b0ll0ck here haven't they?

You might be able to turn off on TLR using a DOS application called WDTLER.

http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&expIds=25657&xhr=t&q=WDTLER&cp=4&pf=p&sclient=psy&site=&source=hp&aq=0&aqi=&aql=&oq=test&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=1&cad=b

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery

OR just run the drives in software raid.

I was planning to raid my 500AADS not so long back. I might not bother now.

I take it samsungs don't have the same problem?
 
Thanks for all your replies so far. I have already worked out why the drives failed, and this is why i decided not to bother running them in raid. I backed up my data then removed the remaining drive from the array.
The drive that dropped does not show up in bios, although i havent tried a different sata port yet. I just wondered if anyone else had had my issue ( i asume there are others as there are several posts about this isssue with the green drives) and whether the drives were bricked as a result.
I am pretty pi**ed about this really as even when i went to WD's site to specifically find this information it was not easy to locate at all.

The fact that the drive WD make specifically for raid are roughly double the price of a standard didnt cheer me up either.

What alternatives are there for a quiet raid setup. I have never had issues with WD in 'non-raid' before, and have never used anything else so i have no other experience.
 
I can't see how running your drive in a raid array could cause any damage to it - I suspect you've unfortunately got a dead disk, and that it's nothing to do with whether it's been in a raid array or not. IFAIK these drives will work in raid, but it's not recommended because of what happens when an disk error occurs, and this issue isn't unique to WD. I'm not trying to jump to WD's defence here, but their (much) more expensive enterprise class raid drives are aimed at 24x7 use and have longer warranties, so it's not just a firmware parameter that's different.

If this is on a normal pc, I'd question whether raid is the best approach for you - it might provide fault tolerance of a single disk failure, but is useless on it's own for backup. I prefer to do regular system images/backups to separate disks (plus other backups elsewhere), and if a disk dies it's still a quick restore.
 
wonko said:
If this is on a normal pc, I'd question whether raid is the best approach for you - it might provide fault tolerance of a single disk failure, but is useless on it's own for backup. I prefer to do regular system images/backups to separate disks (plus other backups elsewhere), and if a disk dies it's still a quick restore.
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I am using an SSD for windows disk, and have another 500gd drive for other programs and games. I have been using a 1tb green drive for a few years for media storage, itunes, photo's etc. I backup my media to my nas (its a 1tb single disk LG unit) but figured that having two disks in raid-1 would mean if anything happens eventually to a single green disk i just drop another disk into the array to replace it and on i go. Seemed a good option to me, as i would like to upgrade the nas at some point in the future, and having the disks already will be a bonus later.

Antway, from what i understand from the comments so far my disk may be dead, but it probably wasnt the raid that killed it? I will need to have a fiddle about tonight and see if i can get it to run through another port or a controller card. If that doesnt work then back to OC it goes..
 
Its_Me said:
Thanks for the info in the thread, i was considering raiding some WD greens :eek:
Click to expand...

Yea i was considering the same drives, now im back to square one! :mad: Im also thinking that the Samsung Spinpoint F4s will have the same problems :/.

Lucky i seen this thread! Can anyone recommend a drive?
 
Ive been running wd cav greens for over a year and theyve been great, no problems at all. And the drives are soo nice and quiet. I have everything backed up on a seagate barracuda aswell because i know raid0 arrays arent the safest. But ive had no problems :)
 
I'm the same, been running 4 WD10EARS now for almost a year and a half on a RAID 10, no problems what so ever! I've had a few error checks but that was because I had to restart the machine on a hard reset. I just left it to check the RAID and it was fine, did take a while to do this but I'm a patient person anyway.

It's been fine this whole time, plus the WD10EARS drives have 64MB cache which is good, I bought mine just after the 64MB cache had been released.

Bearing in mind I'm running my RAID 10 from top of the range ASUS motherboard, I just plug the drives directly into the motherboard instead of a RAID card or something. When I set my RAID 10 system up I paid close attention to the instructions in my Asus board's manual.

Touch wood, nothing has gone wrong so far. It seems to run well, might not be the fastest RAID system in the world compared to other drives. It has been fine this whole time, the fact the drives are energy efficient is a good thing also. Exactly how long do you wait to test out a RAID anyway, I'm sure after 18 months something would have gone wrong by now?

I plan on buying some more WD10EARS to build another RAID 10 system in a couple of weeks. I think the people who are talking about that they're not designed for this kind of setup are mostly paranoid in a lot of cases because they don't fully understand what they're doing.

I am no expert on RAID but I have managed to run one now for some time, I have been very lucky that things have gone my way.
 
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