Another WD20EARS Question

[jay964]

My server hasn't been built yet, just waiting on a few parts to arrive. 

Right now I'm using 4 x 2tb WD20EARS drives in a WHS install.  These drives have been Jumpered on pins 7 & 8.  From my understanding, UNRAID doesn't need the drives to be jumpered.  Okay great.  Then I went on to read that if the WD drives have already been jumpered, removing the jumper and using in a new install may cause some issues.  Can anyone recommend the steps I should take to install these drives in my new Unraid system?

[Rajahal]

Leave the jumpers in place.  The drives will work just fine in unRAID with the jumpers in place, no special action is needed.

[leu4life]

I have two 2 TB WD EARS Green Drives and from my experience and what Ive read the jumpers should be off with unraid 4.7 and later. I have unraid 4.7 and jumpered both drives. When i went to preclear them 1 kicked off right away and started at 100mb/s. The other took a while for the screen to pop up to even start the preclearing process. After i got that one started i think the fastest i saw it was at 20mb/s and just kept dropping from there until it was at a steady 1-2mb/s. Since i didn't add them to an array yet i did more research and 4.7 (which i have) it said EARS drives don't need to be jumpered anymore. It does suggest to use the -A option when preclearing them unless it is already set in the settings of unraid then you can just not use that -A option. Anyway, after i took off the jumper it started right away and shot up to 100mb/s for preclearing. Its going to take over 24hrs though. fyi. Thats my experience.

 

So excited to get my unraid server going, but have to wait for the preclear process ;(

[Rajahal]

If you have a WDEARS disk with a jumper installed:

 

If you are running unRAID 4.7 at default settings, then you can leave the jumpers in place and get full performance from these drives.  If you preclear them with the jumpers installed, then you should not specify any options in the preclear command, like this:

 

preclear_disk.sh /dev/sdX

 

This will preclear the disk as a non-advanced format disk, which is what you want as the jumper is making the disk pretend to be non-advanced format.  Alternatively, you could use this syntax:

 

preclear_disk.sh -a /dev/sdX

 

That would achieve the same results.

 

If you are running unRAID 5.0beta at default settings or have enabled the 'mbr: 4k-aligned' setting in unRAID 4.7, then you should preclear a WDEARS with a jumper installed using this syntax:

 

preclear_disk.sh -a /dev/sdX

 

You specifically want to override unRAID's settings and preclear the disk as non-advanced format.

 

 

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If you have a WDEARS disk with no jumper installed:

 

If you are running unRAID 5.0beta or have enabled the 'mbr: 4k-aligned' setting in unRAID 4.7, then you should preclear a WDEARS without a jumper installed using this syntax:

 

preclear_disk.sh /dev/sdX

 

or

 

preclear_disk.sh -A /dev/sdX

 

The result will be the same either way.  The disk will be precleared as an advanced format disk.

 

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I know this is a bit complicated, but it only affects WDEARS disks.  Since that line is now being replaced with the WDEARX line, this issue will phase out over time.  The bottom line is that you should NEVER remove a jumper from a WDEARS disk if there is already one installed, and you should NEVER add a jumper to a WDEARS that has never had one in the past.

 

leu4life: Basically, you got lucky.  Many people who have removed the jumper from a used WDEARS drive found that it bricked the drive.  Few have reported the success that you had in removing the jumper.  In my opinion it isn't worth the risk of removing the jumper when the above workarounds are available.