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.
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
