February 3, 200818 yr I recently built an UnRaid box with 3 1TB Western Digital Caviar GP WD10EACS drives. These drives have been the subject of other posts, primarily for their low power consumption..hence their "Green" label from WD. I added the 3 drives to my box and when UnRaid boots, it sees the drive type, heads, sectors, etc but then I see errors stating that "Spinup Failed" and "Reinitialization Failed" finally resulting in the drive being listed as disabled. For kicks, I even tried to go back to version 4.1 to see if that worked better...no dice. I have tested the drives in other machines, and even in the same box with another software RAID app and they show up/work properly. I have put some other spare drives that I had laying around in the UnRAID box and UnRAID sees them fine. From what I have read in posts from other users that have these same drives, there have been no compatibility issues. Here is my setup: ASUS M2N32-WS Pro Motherboard w/ 6 onboard SATAII connectors (NV RAID) AMD 64 X@ 4000+ CPU 2 GB CORSAIR XMS2 Memory Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Any way to "force" a drive to come up after UnRAID lists it as disabled?
February 3, 200818 yr I have no personal experience with these drives, but did a little research. http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1679&p_created=1191258655 This link to WD specs shows a jumper you may want to experiment with, the jumper across pins 3 and 4. It seems to be related to spinup and power management. http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=e61289333adcd36e4a33a2dbdd5c3e8d&t=1259535 This thread discusses the WD10EACS drives, and mentions a TLER bug and a tool to fix/adjust it, *might* be what is affecting you. It also mentions some 'interesting' speed tests. Thankfully, the sequential speeds seems reasonable, and random access is a very low priority to most unRAID users, for streaming and backup use. https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695/comments/235 Also, this post mentions a possibly worrying aspect of this series of drive. This is only one report, and needs to be confirmed, but makes me wonder if caution is needed here, before purchasing more of them. I would certainly like to hear some expert opinion. The implication is that they might only last a year. Of course, it will be more useful to hear from users who actually have these drives, and the changes, if any, they have made to them.
February 3, 200818 yr Author Hi Rob Thanks for your reply... After I read your post, I gave the first two issues a try. I added jumpers to the 3 drives over pins 3 & 4. That did not change anything. I then downloaded and applied the WD TLER fix to all three drives and again, no better results. One clarification from my initial post. The error that flies past during boot state "revalidation failed" not "reinitialization failed" as I posted earlier. The spinup messages is prefaced with IDENTIFY FAILED.
February 3, 200818 yr I have 3 identical drives currently running with no issues. Although when I purchased them, 2 of the 3 were DOA, they were unable to be recognized on my server and on 2 different systems running Windows. I did 2 advanced RMA's through WD. With the problem drives my systems would hang for a long period during startup or just never get past the post screen.
February 3, 200818 yr Author In my case, I don't think these guys are DOA since I was able to create/delete partitions to the drive from within Vista, and was able to create a RAID5 using FreeNAS. I am determined to get this to work under UnRAID. The only thing I have yet to try is a different SATA controller. While these drives work fine with other OS's and NAS apps, I wonder if there is just something goofy with how UnRAID, the onboard NV RAID controller, and these drives play together. The only other card I have in my box of tricks is a RocketRAID 2320 which does not work with UnRAID. I put an order in for a SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 ($99 at NewEgg), which many people have said works with UnRAID, and plan to test the drives with that. In the interim, I will write down and post the exact errors when they blow by during boot as there are several. If anyone else has experience with these drives in UnRAID, I am curious to hear your experiences (good or bad).
February 3, 200818 yr I recently consolidated my two unRAID boxes into one using 7 of these drives. The only problem that I've had is that the drives show up with two different byte counts, so I don't think it's an unRAID versus WD10EACS issue. Is this a new build or a rebuild? Have you gotten your motherboard to work with other drives? Is the motherboard implementing some type of RAID that is interferring with unRAID? Maybe check the BIOS to make sure all the onboard RAID functions are turned off, and that the drives are showing up as independent drives
February 3, 200818 yr Author This is a new build after experimenting with other types of drives etc. I had an UnRAID box going on this hardware with some old 80GB drives that I had laying around. That worked without any problems. I put it through its paces, and liked what I saw so I purchased these 3 drives. I did not upgrade the drives that were in place, and instead I just did a fresh install. There is no RAID enabled in the BIOS. The BIOS shows the drives independently, and they are listed during post just fine.
February 3, 200818 yr I just built my unraid machine with 2 of these drives and an Asus P5E-VM DO (6 onboard SATA ports). No problems yet.
February 4, 200818 yr First, reduce the system to only ONE 1TB drive. Set the jumpers for MASTER in a single drive system. Second, replace the cables. If that does not work, then swap the drives, and use the OTHER 1TB drive alone, set as master. Tell me what happens.
February 4, 200818 yr Author These are SATA drives, so no Master/Slave jumper. Only jumpers on the drive are shown in the link that RobJ provided above. I removed drives 2 and 3 from the system (both power and SATA cable) and rebooted. The exact same thing happens with only one drive in place. It sees the make of the drive correctly, and then during bootup I see... ata2.00 failed to IDENTIFY (SPINUP failed, err_mask=0x1) ata2.00 revalidation failed (errno=-5) ata2.00 failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs ata2.00 failed to IDENTIFY (SPINUP failed, err_mask=0x1) ata2.00 revalidation failed (errno=-5) ata2.00 disabled When I have the other drives in place, I see the same series of errors for the other drives. Did the same thing above, but this time only had drive 2 plugged in. Same results.
February 4, 200818 yr It might be a Linux driver issue... Here is a thread of messages describing a similar problem with another WD drive. http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg08489.html Joe L.
February 5, 200818 yr Author It might be a Linux driver issue... My only thought there is why do other users report zero issues? That brings me back to my earlier post about whether or not this could just be how the drive, onboard RAID controller, and UnRAID work together. What kills me is that ANY OTHER DRIVE works fine. Its just these drives...and just with UnRAID. I did see a post in that thread stating that to resolve their issue, they adjusted the libata to ignore errors after spinup. My experience is zero in this realm, and I do not know if this is even possible with UnRAID.
February 5, 200818 yr If the system is powered up and running, and the drives spinning, and you to a soft boot, do you still get the errors, or does it only happen from a cold boot?
February 5, 200818 yr We have shipped several of these drives with no issues (so far). You can try going to the Settings page and disable spin-down. This will program the drive to not enter standby mode.
February 5, 200818 yr Author If the system is powered up and running, and the drives spinning, and you to a soft boot, do you still get the errors, or does it only happen from a cold boot? Same results either way with a cold or warm boot. You can try going to the Settings page and disable spin-down. This will program the drive to not enter standby mode. Tried that early on and unfortunately, nothing.
February 5, 200818 yr I did some research and this may likely be a problem with linux and certain firmware versions of the WD drive. When people who have had this problem and modded libata to retry after this error, the drive came up w/o errors on retry and proceeded normally. Can you post the drive's date and firmware revision? I don't yet know if you can flash the WD firmware in the field, so it may not be fixable, but at least it would identify the problem.
February 5, 200818 yr Author I do not see a Firmware revision number or version number, but here are the unique numbers I see on them.... Drive 1 - Manufactured Date: 11/15/2007 DCM - HBRCNV2AAB WWN - 50014EE2561166AC Drive 2 - Manufactured Date: 9/17/2007 DCM - HARCNT2ABB WWN - 50014EE20089AF75 Drive 3 - Manufactured Date: 11/15/2007 DCM - HBRCNT2AAB WWN - 50014EE2AB66D5A6 Not sure what the DCM and WWN numbers are. Other than those 2 numbers, the only other identifying number I saw was the serials. Anyone care to provide info on their drives that work?
February 5, 200818 yr Author I just did a search for what a DCM number is and evidently, it somehow relates to the firmware revision on the drive.
February 8, 200818 yr Author Well, the SuperMicro SATA Controller card came today. I hooked all 3 drives up to that card, and same results. Same errors. Sounds like BubbaQ and JoeL are probably right...it's a Linux drive issue specifically related to this revision of drive firmware. FreeBSD and Windows are fine. Linux...no dice. I guess I can try throwing in a full blown Linux distro (Fedora or Ubuntu perhaps) and see if the drives show up. This is a huge disappointment. I spent hundreds of dollars on drives that are said to work fine with UnRAID (and are even sold by them) and WD throws something into the config that causes them to be incompatible. I guess that unless someone is willing/able to walk me through changing the libata to get past this error, or the next release of UnRAID can fix this, or unless the firmware is in fact flashable, I have to move on to another NAS solution. ARRGGHH.
February 8, 200818 yr I suggest RMA'ing the drives and hopefully the replacements have different firmware. In the end, it is WD problem so the financial penalty should be their's. Bill
February 8, 200818 yr Well, the SuperMicro SATA Controller card came today. I hooked all 3 drives up to that card, and same results. Same errors. Sounds like BubbaQ and JoeL are probably right...it's a Linux drive issue specifically related to this revision of drive firmware. FreeBSD and Windows are fine. Linux...no dice. I guess I can try throwing in a full blown Linux distro (Fedora or Ubuntu perhaps) and see if the drives show up. This is a huge disappointment. I spent hundreds of dollars on drives that are said to work fine with UnRAID (and are even sold by them) and WD throws something into the config that causes them to be incompatible. I guess that unless someone is willing/able to walk me through changing the libata to get past this error, or the next release of UnRAID can fix this, or unless the firmware is in fact flashable, I have to move on to another NAS solution. ARRGGHH. Send an e-mail to Tom... he said the next release of unRaid will be out shortly,it is based on the newest stable Linux kernel, perhaps it will help you. Joe L.
February 8, 200818 yr I second Joe's suggestion. If a new version is within sight, wait for it to test it out. Ask Tom.
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