Shucked WD80EDAZ drive wreaks havoc at bootup


Recommended Posts

UNRAID version 6.8.3

 

I recently purchased a WD 8TB EasyStore external drive from Best Buy that contained a WD80EDAZ drive.  I've been shucking drives from external enclosures for years and never had any issues with them.  All of the other WD drives in my server are WD80EMAZ or WD80EZAZ models and they work fine with no issues.  I am using a 24-bay Supermicro server rack in conjunction with an 8-bay Supermicro rack all connected to the same ASUS A88X-PRO motherboard in the larger rack.  I have a single extra SATA slot in the smaller rack that I use to pre-clear drives exclusively.  I have tried running a pre-clear on this drive several times and it just quits after a few minutes with an error.  I don't recall what the exact error was but it would always crap out after just a few minutes.  The server backplane is powered by 4-pin Molex connectors from the PSU so there's never been an issue with the 3.3V signal on pin 3 since it simply isn't there.

 

I pulled the drive and ran the WD Data Lifeguard diagnostics on a standalone PC that I use for that purpose, both short and long tests, and it passed.  I performed a quick erase to get rid of the extra partition that WD installs with their external drives.  When I reinstalled the drive back in my server it just bogged everything down to the point where it was extremely slow to boot or just failed to boot altogether.  I saw some kind of error message about SATA9 and that the transfer rate was dialed back to 1.5 Gb/s on the one occasion where it did actually boot up, but the drive didn't show up on the web GUI as an unassigned drive.

 

I removed the drive from the array and now it boots up just fine so it's definitely what's causing the boot issue.  I am currently running a full erase on the drive to see if that helps.  Right now I'm stumped since this drive does not seem to be compatible with my server.  The Windows 7 PC that I use to run the diagnostics boots with no problems with this drive connected.

 

Does anyone else have any experience using this drive in their server?  If so, have you run across any similar issues and what did you do to correct them?

Edited by captain_video
Link to comment

I did some further research and it seems that Western Digital is using a different drive in the 8TB easy store external enclosures.  Speculation is that there's a shortage of the WD red drives that they had been using so they went with a different drive that they had on hand.  Apparently these drives get extremely hot and are not very good from that aspect, especially in an external enclosure.  That doesn't answer my question about why it doesn't work in UNRAID or why it causes the server to bog down or completely freeze during bootup. 

 

I reinstalled the drive back in the enclosure and reformatted it so it could be recognized in Windows.  It just doesn't have the WD extra partition or software on it anymore.  I took it back to Best Buy and they gave me a refund.

Link to comment

I believe that was mentioned in one of the articles I saw.  I have to wonder if that's going to become a trend with newer WD drives.  I'm hoping that the shortage of red drives was the real issue and they will start using them again once supply catches up with the demand.  I won't buy another 8 TB WD drive in an external enclosure until I'm sure I'm getting one of the other drives.  I'm perfectly fine with using Seagate.  Over half of the drives used in my server are either 4TB or 8TB Seagates shucked from external enclosures and they're still working just fine.

Link to comment
On 3/7/2021 at 10:21 PM, captain_video said:

When I reinstalled the drive back in my server it just bogged everything down to the point where it was extremely slow to boot or just failed to boot altogether. 

I use different WD shuck disk air/heilium form 8T-12T, all work good.

 

For power usage or temperature issue, from many years experience with different disk, the power usage almost within same range, won't too high or too low. Just high capacity disk due to its thickness, so hard for cooling only.

Edited by Vr2Io
Link to comment

I've been gradually upgrading all of the 3TB and 4TB drives in my server with 8TB drives as they get a lot of age on them.  I have about a 60-40 mix of Seagate to WD drives with a few HGST drives mixed in.  I've never had this issue with any drive before, regardless of manufacture or capacity.  I used to have a lot of 1.5TB Samsung drives and never had a single failure using them.  I believe Seagate bought them out years ago so they're pretty much defunct now.  I also had a handful of Toshiba 3TB drives, but they have since been upgraded with 8TB drives.  The server is currently at 176 TB capacity and counting.  I've been running unRAID for about 11 years or more and couldn't be happier.  It's been running off the same 1 TB flash drive for most of that time so that drive is probably living on borrowed time.

Link to comment

I'm sure the drive I had was an exception to the rule.  I would like to think that these drives are decent enough to use in a PC or a server.  Mine just seems to be an aberration.  The weird thing is that it seemed to have no problems working on a Windows PC.  my UNRAID server just seemed to take great exception to it for some reason.  I've probably used about five dozen different drives in my unRAID server over the years and this is the first time I have ever experienced anything like this (I've got over 40 hard drives sitting on a shelf that were pulled from the server over the years due to upgrades).  The server has never had any problems booting regardless of which make or model drive I had installed in the array.

 

Update:  I picked up some 8TB Seagate Archive drives on ebay and tried to run a pre-clear on one of them.  Had the exact same issue with the new drive.  The drive would show up as an unassigned drive in the array and would start the pre-clear process before crapping out after only a few minutes.  I uninstalled the pre-clear plugin and installed it again from the community apps tab.  When I booted up the server I had the same issue with it hanging up as I did with the WD drive.

 

I shut down the server and swapped the drive and placed it into another empty slot in the server rack.  I used a different cable attached to the backplane and this time it booted with no problems.  I started running the pre-clear plugin with the new configuration and so far everything is looking good so I'm thinking it was either the cable or the backplane connection that was causing the issue.

Edited by captain_video
Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.