By Philip Churchill on June 17th, 2010
Beware WD Green Hard Drives
If you have any of the Western Digital (WD) Green hard drives are you experiencing random errors or low performance during reading and writing?
If so, then you are not alone. It appears that certain models of the WD Green drives will eventually give low performance during the reading and writing of data. This has been seen by at least one user and by NAS producer Synology.
From information gathered from different sources, the only reliable models in the Green range from WD are the following:
- 2TB: WD20EADS-00R6B0
- 1.5TB: WD15EADS-00R6B0
- 1TB: WD10EADS-00L5B1
You can read additional information about this story here.
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Great! Somebody else noticed the problem. But: it is a stay of execution, alas. The problem lies in the fact that the WD EARS drives use a sectorsize of 4kb instead of 512 bytes. As long as your partitions align with a multiple of 8 “old” sectors you will see no problems, but WinXP and Server 2003 partitions begin at sector 63…
Starting next year all disk manufacturers will convert to the 4kb sector to break the 2 Tb barrier. It’s everybody’s problem then.
The solution for the moment is either jumper the drive so it will work with xp/2003, or lowlevel format the drive to 512 byte sectors. WD has an utility for that.
Going back to the problem: pilot error. It says on the drive that you either have to lowlevel format it or set the jumper if you want to use it with older operating systems…
Piotr
I just filled up my drives.
http://bigredsplace.com/screencapture/?id=2010-06-17_1051__time_for_more_harddrives.png
I’m looking to buy new drives. My current drives are EACS. I’m confused if there was a problem with them or not. I have not had any problems with these yet….yet?
Interesting and worrying.
I have a WD15EADS-00P8B0. This was added new to a HP EX490 running windows home server (ie server 2003). I didn’t set any jumpers
But this isn’y a WD15EARS — so I assume the second part of the model number isn’t important, and I still have 512 byte sectors?
I have 2 drivers WD15EADS-00P8B0 and I can confirm that they are really slow and freezes a lot.
I RMA one of the drive and they sent me a same model one. I have a Samsung also and I really happy with it. The temperature diference between a WD and Samsung is 4ºc to 5ºc.
Stay away of WD WD15EADS-00P8B0 !
@bigred: only disks marked EARS have the 4k sector, and potentially the problem. EACS and EADS should work…
There is a workaround if you have Windows 7 running: connect the disk to the W7 machine, partition & format it, and connect it to your homeserver. Do NOT repartition it afterwards!. W7 doesn’t have the partition problem.
@Nigel: Yep. as I said above: anything not marked EARS still has 512 byte sectors. But see Diogo’s comment: according to him the disk s*cks dead bunnies…
Piotr
I just saw this and realized after reading the article that I have one of the WD15EADS-00P8B0 drives. Recently I started having trouble with .wtv files streaming to media pc and then the xbox. I only have 3 drives and assume that the recorded tv is getting stored on this drive since it is the largest free drive. The server will hang and I can’t access shares or console for a bit. After a few minutes, it starts working again. Does this sound like something that has happened in your system? I do have Perfect Disk 10 that I won from mswhs.com installed also. I thought it was drive extender but noting is being moved during that time or even that day. Should I turn off Perfect disk until I get a different drive? I’m thinking about staying with Black drives from now on.
so….if i buy this for WHS … can i just set jumpers ….i thought thats all I had to do?
is there more ? do i have to do the crazy extra format thing…?
WD20EARS is the drives I was thinking about getting.
This is a very bittersweet post. On one hand this may be the very reason why I’m having speed issues, on the other, ugh how to fix it?
I have two WD10EARS installed in the WHS box I built 4 months ago. Moved all of my documents, pics and media to it and was thrilled… until I discovered the severe hit I was taking in access speed.
Opening docs, downloading new podcasts (if it hasn’t been done in a few days) or populating a list of photos in Picasa became painful at times.
I’ve tested my network connections, tested the cables, tried a different gigabit router, turned off all power-saving settings on the WHS, all had no affect on this intermittent, but daily problem.
So now I (may) have a new culprit… what is a solid recommendation for fixing this issue? I am past my return policy on the two drives. Any help or suggestion would be great.
chuck: go to http://www.wdc.com/en/products/advancedformat/ and download the advanced format utility for your drive.
Select the version for WinXP, WHS uses the same disk format.
Now: BACK UP YOUR DRIVES! If you run the format utility they will be cleaned. Your data is toast.
reinstall your WHS, restore the data, and you are on full speed.
Piotr
ok…so again more conflicting reports …
maybe i’m dumb here, but as a CS guy …i’m suppose to figure this junk out :p.
My situation… I want to add 2TB drives to my pool of drives …
do i need to use jumpers PLUS do the advanced formating? OR can I just use jumpers and add the 2 TB drives to the pool?
Thanks
I have two green drives, see http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/5263/2xwdc.jpg. But it looks they both use 512 byte sectors. I have no problems apar from occasionally when copying large files it slows down to like 7-10MB/s. But I reckon a reformat is not necessary for me?
This is an interesting subject, Philip, have you heard anything else about this?
@bigred: if you use the drive as one big partition just set the jumper, and you are fine. the only thing the jumper does is align the sectors to a multiple of 8 “old” sectors.
If you want to partition the drive however you either have to partition it using Win7 or reformat it using wd’s advanced format. Why? Because you cannot guarantee the second partition starts at a mulitiple of 8 sectors when using the 2003/XP diskpart utility. Your first partition is full speed, the second one slows down.
@Erik: I’ll have to test it: maybe the drive fools the OS into thinking it has 512 byte sectors, while actually having 4k…
Never checked it. You always learn something new on the Internet 🙂
Piotr
As mentioned in comments, this is an old “problem”. The label on the EARS discs has warning written on it that says the drive should be jumpered for use on Windows XP systems. Although it’s not very clear this also goes for Windows Server 2003 (which WHS is built on) it’s not a disk that would typically be used in a server, plus most power users would recognize this potential problem.
I have a large number of 1.5 and 2TB WD disks in use, including jumpered EARS discs and other EADS discs. All are performing great.
Im with Daniel on this one – its not a new problem and I have also been using them for a while and havent had a single problem as yet
Andrew
Really? Problems ‘with at least one user’ and you have a headline like that?
Always assume PEBCAK – problem exists between the chair and the keyboard.
This is a none issue – I have a WHS full of WD EARS drives of differing sizes and across multiple batches with no problems at all. Simply add the jumper if you’re using as a data drive before you add it to the server, and off you go.
If you try to use one as the system drive, prepare for pain … but then again WHS is OEM software, not retail. These WD drives are consumer desktop drives not server drives – the label on each disk covers 99% of users – XP, Vista and Win7. The commercial WHS vendors are aware of this and will happily sell you an ‘approved’ drive that comes from an older 512byte range – we as ‘expert’ consumers choose to go it alone with home builds of buying the cheapest option so have to take the consequences when problems occur.
4KB sectors are now the standard for new drives – even those way below the 2TB limit, so get used to them. The last laptop drive I bought (Toshiba) has then.
I’d expect a retraction and explaination of this story, and to be honest have lost a great deal of respect for this site. This ‘issue’ and the solutions have been covered extensively elsewhere in the WHS arena for months.
Damn, that feels like a rant.
@Gary: Great post. I’d come to the conclusion that the easiest way forward with the EARS disks and WHS was to use the 7-8 jumper – but I wasn’t sure that Server 2003 used the same partition layout as XP.
Now I can add my new drive 🙂
@Piotr Thank you for the input, I will be doing this very soon. I appreciate the aid!
@Gary I’m not trying to get into a flame war, but relax on the elitism here; the article was written as a resource, and obviously sparked a number of comments as a discussion and has helped some of us. We learn based on “books”, experience, and the experience of others… which we find here. We are not all experts in every arena of IT, we all have to start some place in our new techy endeavours. I researched prior to building my WHS, but did not find anything regarding the EARS drives until it was already built and in use. This post I happened upon, and it may be the crux of my issue. So, IMO, this post has helped me.
@Chuck
Understood. Think I was having a bad day then. Lemme know if you’ve got any question’s re the EARS drives – both my WHS boxes have then and i’ve had no probs.
As for a fix … If you have the capacity / an external drive to use as temp storage, i’d use the WHS remove function on one of the EARS disks. Once it’s done, eject it / shut down the server then add a jumper to the drive (pins 7+8 iirc, I paid about £2 delivered for 100 on ebay if you don’t have any) and stick it back in. Then add the drive back into the pool and it should be full speed.
Then simply follow the same process for the second disk.
There are people on various forums who have forced the WD align tool onto the WHS and used that. Personally i’d avoid it … ‘hacking’ anything near a server is a no-no. Using the jumper method – it just works. When it comes to upgrade to WHS 2 and you want to re-use the disks simply remove the jumper and add as normal.
Personaly i’m a little annoyed at MS for this – they could have easily patched WHS / XP / 2003 to align on 4k boundaries when formatting new disks and the problem wouldn’t have occurred.
@Gary: we are not all experts on diskdrives 🙂 If I wasn’t clear at first explaining about the 4k sector problem: English is not my native language. It isn’t even my second: start with Russian, German, Dutch, French, and finally English. And the Kings English at that. It took me a few years to “unlearn” British English and teach myself the American vernacular.
Anyhow: I am one of those people testing drives for a very *big* company whose existence depends on disks being reliable. And even then I learn something new. See below.
So please, whenever you post something (anything),as said keep in mind that we are not all experts. Not even I… Pretty please?
@Erik: Indeed, even if the drive has 4k sectors, it fools the OS in having 512 byte sectors. Why? Don’t know. OS-es work with a cluster of eight 512 byte sectors, which equals 4k. Therefore said OS doesn’t care if it sees eight 512 sectors or one 4k sector. As I said above: everyday you learn something new.
Piotr