I have upgraded my server to 3TB drives. I am sending my 2TB WD20EARS to a buddy to upgrade his 1TB drives. I've tried reading through all the WD20EARS and Advanced Format threads, but I just confuse myself. When I got these drives (2-3 years ago) it was recommended to jumper them, so I did. They have worked great. Now it appears you can use them un-jumpered as long as you set the default partition format to 4-k aligned and if you have them jumpered and use the 4-k aligned format the drives may suffer performance issues.

 

So my question is this; What should the newer owner do to use these drives? They are currently still jumpered and removed straight from my Unraid system, so they are still formated. The new UnRaid system they are going into has the partition format set to 4-k aligned. Should the jumpers be removed? Will UnRaid re-format the drive when using them as an upgrade drive from his 1TB drives?

They'll work fine either way;  but if he's going to reformat them and use them with v5, you may as well remove the jumpers.

 

That was my thought on it. With the jumpers off it should not be an issue using 4-k aligned partitions, correct?

The drive will have to be cleared before or when your friend adds it to his unRAID system.

 

If his default partition format is MBR 4K aligned, it would probably be better to remove the jumper before installing and have it formatted as 4K aligned.

 

You could also preclear the drive before you send it to him and run the preclear with the -A parameter which will set it to 4K aligned (after removing the jumper). This would also remove any of your data on the drive before you send it to him (or her).

 

When I was first trying unRAID, this issue came up for me as I had 1 WD20EARS drive and I had the jumper on it when running 4.6.x. When 4.7 came out, I did a lot of research on whether to remove the jumper or leave it. Many people just said to leave it as is if it was already jumpered and formatted as MBR unaligned. Since I was adding a bunch more WD green drives that I hadn't yet jumpered and formatted or added to the system, I decided to remove the jumper and reformat/preclear with the 4K aligned setting. That way I wouldn't have only 1 drive that was jumpered and different from the rest.

Thanks for the reply of your experience with removing the jumper.

 

I will remove the jumpers and send him the drives. I'll let him deal with the format and pre-clear. Actually I will be doing it, just remotely.

I must be getting old. I was sure we had reports that removing the jumpers caused some drive to brick.

I must be getting old. I was sure we had reports that removing the jumpers caused some drive to brick.

 

Well, if there were problems, I've been lucky with mine, when I re-purposed around 7 drives to a new ZFS box (and with that removing the jumper).

I don't remember any issues with bricking.

 

I thought the only issue was the drive running very slow if it was incorrectly jumpered and formatted.

 

It needs to be jumpered when it's a regular format (unaligned) and unjumpered when it's advanced format (4K aligned) otherwise it could run slowly.

 

There's more info in this thread: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=11842.0

It may have been the very earliest firmware versions but we definitely had some users brick drives by later removing the jumper.

 

Sounds as if though this may have been rare and then just typical internet Chinese whispers kept it going.

I don't remember any issues with bricking.

 

I thought the only issue was the drive running very slow if it was incorrectly jumpered and formatted.

 

It needs to be jumpered when it's a regular format (unaligned) and unjumpered when it's advanced format (4K aligned) otherwise it could run slowly.

 

There's more info in this thread: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=11842.0

This is what I thought I had read. I did see one or two mentions of bricking, but no confirmed reports of that. Thanks for that link. Somehow I couldn't find it when searching.

I must be getting old. I was sure we had reports that removing the jumpers caused some drive to brick.

 

Well, if there were problems, I've been lucky with mine, when I re-purposed around 7 drives to a new ZFS box (and with that removing the jumper).

What process did you use to re-purpose those drives and remove the jumper?

What process did you use to re-purpose those drives and remove the jumper?

 

...no special procedure at all.

I pulled the unRAID stick, put in a SSD as OS-drive, pulled all jumpers from the WD disks and installed Solaris-Express 

So the drives arrived at my buddy's house. The odd thing is NONE of the three drives will show up in the BIOS or any OS with or without the jumpers installed.

So the drives arrived at my buddy's house. The odd thing is NONE of the three drives will show up in the BIOS or any OS with or without the jumpers installed.

Assuming they are powered, is it possible the SATA ports are disabled in the BIOS?

They are powered and the SATA ports are enabled. I am at a bit of a loss. I got too busy with work to dig even more into, but we tried them on 2 different systems. For now, I just had him put them back in the static bags and we will deal with it later in the week when I get out from under this crushing work load.

Turns out 2 of the 3 drives bricked when the jumper was removed. WD pled ignorance to the issue but offered to replace one of the 2 failed drives. The drives were 3 months out of warranty so we took them up on the replacement. The 2 that bricked had the actual green colored label, the one that did not brick had a black and white label (yes it was still a green drive).

 

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk

 

Sad thing...However, I do only have the "old" green labeled ones...and I did set and pull

the jumpers on them several times, as I was experimenting/learning with ZFS and 4k support.

All seven of them are still in service.

 

I'd suspect some other cause for your new paperweights.

 

Possibly so. Maybe something happened during shipping, although I packed them very well. My only other thought is somehow the Rosewill bays killed them.

The bays do nothing but connect the drives electrically -- it's VERY unlikely they contributed to any failure.    Nor did removing and/or replacing the jumpers.    It's almost certain the shock during shipment is what caused the failures ... almost certainly to drives that were marginally close to failing anyway.

 

Be happy that WD agreed to replace a drive that was 90 days past its warranty -- that's a very generous offer on their part.

 

Yeah I know how the bays work. The odd thing is another drive (older 750GB Seagate) in that system failed as soon as those other drives were added. Bizarre coincidence,  maybe.  It is the first time I have dealt with more than one drive dying at once in 20+ years. So 3 drives failed in total, with the only commonality being the bays. I also think it should be unlikely. Anyhow, I just wanted to report back the results of what happened.