How to Config SSD and 2 WD Caviar Blacks

I gave WD a chance based on your recomendations. The first one kept disconnecting, the second was DOA (it was like I didn't even plug it in), and the third one had the same random disconnect issue as the first. After all the cross shipping, I ended up getting a refund...but I had to pay a restocking fee, orriginal shipping, and return shipping three times. I could have bought a nice 1TB Seagate for all the money I pissed away giving WD three chances in a row. You say they have not had any issues in years, yet even you will remember that these random disconnect issues have existed since they released their first 1.5TB, and it is still there. It is theoreticaly possible that I just have the worst luck in the world when it comes to WD drives, but I'm not about to spend another $90 and 6 weeks on giving them another chance...all to be left with nothing but the knowledge to avoid this terrible company.

 

A 1.5TB drive is running in my fileserver right now perfectly well. I have read about the issues the 1.5TB drives are meant to have (and indeed the 1TB drives as well) but have never experienced them. Out of curiosity, when did you buy the drives? All the bad reviews of them are bunched together on newegg, clearly indicating newegg received a dodgy batch.

 

I bought the first one about 2 months ago...around the time of all those "I have $10,000 to spend" threads. I recieved it about a week later, then the second one 2 weeks later, and the third 2 more weeks later. By the time I had shipped back the third one, I had waisted 6 weeks.

If 3 drives seperated by over a month were all part of the same bad batch (the middle one with a different problem), then WD must have made a mountain of bad drives without sample testing any of them. Either that, or they did some kind of quick-test that does not detect the random disconnect issue that they know they have, and have had since launch. Either way, it is not acceptable when none of my Seagate drives have had such issues, and they cost the same with higher speeds. WD is back on my s**t list for at least 2 years, and there is nothing anyone can say that will change that now. At this point, I would not even trust them in RAID5...if 3 out of 3 were bad, then 2 out of 4 failing at once would not be a suprise.

 

What S-ATA controller did you hook them up to?

 

I tried them with the onboard controler on a nVidia 570SLI based board, on the onboard controler of a AMD 790FX based board, and attached to my 3ware 9690SA. One was just plain dead, and didn't work with any controler at all. The other two would randomly disconnect for about 0.1 seconds every 3-25 minutes. This was not a big deal with onboard, as there was no errorchecking or rebuilding to do...the only way to see the problem without a utility was when copying files, the whole system would freeze for about 2 seconds, and then go back to how it was before. This leads me to believe that most (if not all) of these drives have this issue, and users just don't realize that the occasional freezing is not windows or spyware, but their hard drive. When I hooked them up to my RAID card to tried to add them to my RAID5 array, I was unable to do so because I was never able to get past 5% of "clearing" before the drive reset and the process reset with it. This is probably the main reason that WD recomends against using their drives with hardware RAID...hardware RAID wants working drives.

 

No, hardware RAID wants drives with TLER installed. TLER is meant to only be used with RAID edition drive, but you can patch it into the retail versions. One of my WD10EADS drives has the occasional locking issue, but to be honest it's no big deal at all. If I was going RAID I would apply TLER to it anyway and the problem would 99-100% certain go away. I would much rather have a slight stutter in performance than have a drive lose all my data a few months down the line as I would get with a Seagate (and possibly a Samsung as well).