Western Digital 2TB Pathetic

Gnome

Gnome

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I bought 3x Western Digital Green Power 2TB drives (WD20EARS) from Wootware end February.

Within the first week, one failed, my LSI SAS2008 controller reported: "Deivce XX removed from controller because it is not responding to commands after 32 000ms". I sent it back and they are sending me another.

But last night I noticed from another drive: "Read failure on sector YY. Device XX has encountered bad blocks on sector YY, and is attempting to recover"

WTF is the deal with these drives, I've never had this kind of problem before.

All these drives are less than 2 weeks old :sick:

Could it be because of floods? I've bought quite a few WD drives and never had this kind of failure rate.
 
WD20EARS is an old model, EARS are no longer produced, replaced by EARX.

Check the date of manufacture, when were they produced?
 
UnUnOctium said:
Maybe they still have seawater in them?
Click to expand...

LOL, wouldn't surprise me. The first one that failed, starts up. Then as soon as the controller tries to read from it the disk has a "power dip" (for lack of a better word). And it sounds like it lost power for a second.
 
Old stock surely?

Western Digital caviar Green WD20EARX , 2Tb/2000gb , Sata6G , with intellipower ( 5400-7200rpm for powersaveing ) , 64mb cache - 3 years warranty
 
South_Bit said:
WD20EARS is an old model, EARS are no longer produced, replaced by EARX.

Check the date of manufacture, when were they produced?
Click to expand...

My warranty obviously started when I bought it (and will hold them to it) but for the supplier the warranty started in December (according to warranty check). So probably was produced around then.

What is the difference between EARS VS EARX

EDIT: According to the WD site the only difference is 3GB SATA VS 6GB SATA. I think it is still produced however because they still list it with the EARX under Green Power page.
 
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I love my WD green drives. Sure I've had 2 x 2TB's fail on me a day after I got them (courier probably dropped them and they were packaged badly) and I had a 3TB fail on me the other day after a few months, but to me they are quite reliable and hdd sentinel always warns me a few days before they will fail so I can backup and return for warranty
 
robdutchmonkey said:
I love my WD green drives. Sure I've had 2 x 2TB's fail on me a day after I got them (courier probably dropped them and they were packaged badly) and I had a 3TB fail on me the other day after a few months, but to me they are quite reliable and hdd sentinel always warns me a few days before they will fail so I can backup and return for warranty
Click to expand...

:D

Just checked, I bought the EARX ones.
 
Well the drives are used in a NAS and it reports any problem on the disk, so I'm not sure if the drive that is now reporting bad sectors is just having teething problems but I've never had it before. Don't like it.

Really getting paranoid because it can only survive 1 disk failure. If another of them fails, we'll probably lose a lot of data.
 
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Gnome said:
LOL, wouldn't surprise me. The first one that failed, starts up. Then as soon as the controller tries to read from it the disk has a "power dip" (for lack of a better word). And it sounds like it lost power for a second.
Click to expand...

Are you sure your PSU is not at its limit?
 
UnUnOctium said:
Are you sure your PSU is not at its limit?
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Nah, the PSU I'm using is Cooler Master Silent Pro 600W.

Not to mention the UPS it is connected to (APC Smart UPS 1500i) is reporting less than 15% load from that computer with 9 drives in it. None of the other drives are having problems.

They are in hotswap bays and I've tried that particular drive in different bays and other computers. Didn't work :(
 
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Gnome said:
Nah, the PSU I'm using is Cooler Master Silent Pro 600W.
Click to expand...

Off topic, but do you have an annoying 'humm' coming from your PSU? I'm running the CM Silent Pro Gold 600W in one of my machines and have an annoying buzz/humm a lot of the time. How silent is your silent?
 
South_Bit said:
Off topic, but do you have an annoying 'humm' coming from your PSU? I'm running the CM Silent Pro Gold 600W in one of my machines and have an annoying buzz/humm a lot of the time. How silent is your silent?
Click to expand...

Mine is not the Gold. The gold is louder (which is why I didn't buy it).

It does have that hum, pisses me off big time because it started day 1. Which is why it is now in my NAS. I replaced the standard fan with a slightly higher RPM ball bearing fan (standard fan was sleeve bearing) that blows full speed all the time as the server has many fans anyway. So the PSU runs very cool now (and probably more efficient).

That said the Cooler Master Silent Pro is incredibly close to inaudible when it isn't actually humming.

I've upgraded my desktop machine to a Seasonic X460FL (Fanless Gold 460watt PSU). Got it from Cyberdyne systems Pty. Ltd (Jhb). It is completely silent with 0 hum. The PSU is just absolutely quality, you see it the moment you open it.

Would recommend it if you can afford it!
 
With that controller are you running the discs in RAID? If so I believe that these discs come with TLER disabled by default, which can cause the controller to diagnose errors on an otherwise healthy drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLER
 
South_Bit said:
Off topic, but do you have an annoying 'humm' coming from your PSU? I'm running the CM Silent Pro Gold 600W in one of my machines and have an annoying buzz/humm a lot of the time. How silent is your silent?
Click to expand...

Check if your home's voltage isn't too high, it should be around 230V. My old power supply also made this humming sound when the Eskom had the voltage at 240-255V.
 
garyc said:
With that controller are you running the discs in RAID? If so I believe that these discs come with TLER disabled by default, which can cause the controller to diagnose errors on an otherwise healthy drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLER
Click to expand...

The controller is set to IT mode, meaning the drives are exposed to the OS in AHCI mode directly. Those messages are just warnings that the controller received from the hard-drive. It is to inform the user, not to tell the user the drive was disconnected ;)

I don't use hardware RAID, IMHO hardware RAID is dead. My NAS with the 8 drives in degraded mode still maxes out Gigabit LAN (getting 115MB/s read/write with a 40GB random pattern file). Don't think many hardware RAID controllers can manage that, especially not at the price I paid (normal PC hardware + 1xR800 for the LSI SAS2008 controller which gives me 8 SATA ports).

The software RAID I use doesn't depend on TLER.
 
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