N8800, WD Green drive nightmare!

[kaostheory]

I bought a N8800 and 8 WD 1.5TB Green drives in April from PC Mall. It is now the end of August and I have nothing to show for it. I bought the WD green drives specifically because they were listed on the N8800 compatibility list. I want to use the N8800 but I'm stuck with 8 drives I cannot use with the machine all because Thecus told me over and over the drives would work with the N8800. I don't know what to do now. Anyone have any ideas? I really want to exchange the drives for new ones that WILL work with the N8800 but I can't just let $1000 in drives sit around.

I feel like I've followed all the rules. Bought drives that WERE on the compatibility list and I've been very patient and tried everything Thecus asked me to do.

I have attached below a timeline of what has transpired -

04-28-09 Thecus N8800 ordered with 8 WG 1.5TB Green drives because they were on the Hard Drive compatibility list.
05-19-09 RAID degrades and starts rebuilding
05-22-09 RAID degrades again and starts rebuilding, send config to Thecus
05-23-09 another drive drops from RAID
05-26-09 another drive drops
05-26-09 Thecus says test drives with WD Lifeguard
05-27-09 told Thecus I found a thread that sounds like problems I'm having
05-27-09 drives tested fine on extended test
05-27-09 another drive drops, 4 different drives have dropped
05-27-09 Thecus says to check backplane and make sure it's seated
05-27-09 Thecus says to upgrade FW to 2.01.08 and then re-create RAID
05-28-09 told Thecus I was tired of experimenting, they said wait for raid to rebuild
05-29-09 another drive drops after updating FW and recreating RAID
06-01-09 Thecus tells me to ship it to them to replace motherboard and test
06-02-09 RMA recieved
06-04-09 unit shipped back to Thecus
06-24-09 same unit arrives back to me, no test results or anything. I call Thecus and they said they tested the machine and it came back with no errors using 80GB and 200GB drives. I mention that I'm using 1.5TB drives and they said drives are drives and if the N8800 works with these it will work with the WD Green drives I'm using.
06-26-09 installed drives, recreated RAID and a drive drops out again
06-26-09 contacted Thecus and they said they will ship me a new unit
07-06-09 unit shipped back to Thecus, they won't ship a new one before they get the old one back
07-14-09 new unit from Thecus shipped to me
07-21-09 new unit arrives, works for 5 days and drops a drive
07-23-09 Thecus says they're working on a new firmware to fix this problem. I tell them if the drives are not going to work, I want to return them. They tell me to wait a few more days for the new firmware. Told by Thecus "At this time, this is a top priority for Thecus R&D."
07-28-09 new firmware posted. Thecus says this should fix the problem.
07-31-09 drives drop again. 4 drives in 3 days
07-31-09 Thecus says "Although the situation is still developing, at this time we have serious doubts regarding the WD 2TB drives working in RAID environment, especially since WD Tech Support stated that this drives are not be RAID compatible drives." Then why were these drives on the compatability list?!
08-01-09 Contact PCMall to replace drives. They don't want the drives and they won't let me exchange them for others. PCMall contacts Western Digital and they won't take the drives back either.
08-20-09 I see the Hard Drive Compatibility list no longer lists the WD Green drives.

[philhu]

That is a crock

WD Green RE4 2tb drives are Raid drives. They even say Enterprise storage on them

The whole thing has to do with timing and TLER time

If the drive is marked Enterprise, than it has the TLER set right for raid.


I had a few drop out and rebuild back, but I put them in a dell enclosure and no errors at all

[doubeld1979]

Removed

[Astralon]

I had similar problems with a N5200Pro box and it seems that I was able to resolve the problem by disabling TLER on the WD drives.

[kaostheory]

You would want to turn on TLER...that enables the time limit function and prevents the drive from entering into a deep recovery state which would make the drive drop out of the RAID. I turned on TLER and set it for 7, 7 early on in the troubleshooting. It didn't help.

Apparently the green drives from WD are the issues and I received and email from Thecus yesterday that said - "We apologize for the delay in responding to you, as we have been working directly with WD Engineers to resolve RAID issue. We just released new beta firmware to resolve WD compatibility issues."

They gave me a link to a new FW (N8800_FW_beta_2.01.10.14.bin) and the notes say -

"7. Changed the SATA driver from mvsas 0.5.2 to MV64xx 3.1.0.0903 to
fix the WD2002FYPS and WD20EADS HDD degraded issue.
8. Set the time-out retry to 7 second.
9. Once the disk I/O failure occurs, the event log will be recorded in
"conf.bin". Also, if the Internet is accessible, the NAS will send
syslog to Thecus server 114.32.20.212:5514 UDP.
Note: The remote syslog mechanism in beta 14 is just for debug
purpose. It will be remove from final offical firmware.
In case NAS owner has concerns about this, please skip this
beta 14 and wait for an official release.
A. HDD will not spin down in idle mode."


I have my fingers crossed but I'm not holding my breath.

[kaostheory]

The firmware did not work. Drives 1,2,3 and 4 all just dropped out of the array at the same time.

[Phototechman]

I am running Seagate 1.5tb drives and I have had not odd issues with them. I gave up on most WD drives.

But honestly, get rid of the N8800 and get something more stable. The N8800's are buggy and in the 8 months that I have had 2 in my possessions, I've lost tons of data, had to return one to Thecus for repair and they never work correctly.

Good luck!

[doubeld1979]

Still not fixed, a dropout of 2 disks, can someone tell how long rebuilding takes? My rebuilds are 2000 Minutes with 4 disks is that normal?

Update:
Creating Raid 5 with 3 disk takes 450 minutes, i'm testing my fourth WD RE4 with Diagtool again!

Is it possible to have a disk that bad and WD Diag isn't finding anything? Badsectorscan is also not working it stops a 46% with this disk

[Phototechman]

yes you can have a bad HDD without the diag software being able to pick up the errors.

[doubeld1979]

Thanks Phototechman, Indeed disk is bad, with HDtach this disk is more then 100MB/s slower then the other 3 disks of my, i think its a cache problem or something, i asked for a RMA

1 Down, 3 to go!

[rhumba]

Get up there!

Just so others know we have problems with our N8800.

[redclawkefar]

odd, my 8800 seems just fine. running 8 seagate 1tb drives (ST31000340NS) and the system powers on and off, on schedule without hiccups 4 times a week for doing backups. maybe because i'm not using 1.5 or 2 tb drives my rig is happy. nevertheless i'll be ordering a new n8800sas unit as a second server shortly and will probably have 2tb drives in t.

[Spinola]

Unfortunately I have been facing same problems but with N4100PRO with 4 x hdd seagate 1,5 T from compatibility list.

I am more than disappointed as well.

Spinola

[doubeld1979]

I have now jumpered pin 5 and 6 the WD2002FYPS forcing SATA 1,5 GBit mode, its now working for me no drop outs more!

[Phototechman]

I upgraded to 2tb drives in my N8800 and I haven't had a single issue with the drives at all. I am getting ready to try slap in Seagate Barracuda XT drives to see if the 64mb cache and see if it will work with these and how stable it is.

[s0mvnguy]

This is the worst product we've used, wasted 6months on it using the WD20EADS drives [2TB], haven't been able to bring this unit into production. We've eventually downgrade to 2.01.10.14 and been running for 10days then ->poof!! Random RAID drop out again.

We had good luck with N5200Pro, however with this N8800 we are thinking twice about considering a Thecus product again.