WDxxEADS - time for a new compatibility test by Thecus

WD10EADS, WD15EADS and WD20EADS are on the compatibility list of several Thecus models, including the n5200 pro.

Based on feedback on several forums about the recent releases of these drives, I would like to suggest to Thecus to retest these models for compatibility.
Roughly, reported problems can be categorized as:

1/ Poor (mainly write) performance

Some examples:

http://www.thecusforum.eu/showthread...=9942#post9942
http://thecususergroup.proboards.com...ay&thread=3553

2/ Stalling of one or more drives in the array

Seems to be a problem regardless of the NAS brand, see e.g.:

http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=21296
http://www.thecusforum.eu/showthread...=9343#post9343

The problem is WD Lifeguard doesn't report any issues on the concerned drives, which makes RMA problematic

3/ enable TLER possibility dropped by WD

WD has disabled the possibility to use WDTLER.exe (tool to enable TLER) on WDxxEADS as of November. Not a burning issue, but still worth a warning in the compatibility list.

4/ Disks dropping out of the array

Seems to be an n7700 specific problem. I think Thecus support is well aware of this one :)


I hope Thecus looks into it and acts accordingly. It would be a shame to see the user experience on a good piece of hardware ruined by WDxxEADS disks based on Thecus' compatibility list.

I bought 5x WD15EADS myself based on Thecus' n5200 pro HDD compatibility list and was hit by two of the above issues.

Thanks,
B

On N3200 pro my WD20EADS are flawless in terms of data retention and reliability so far EXCEPT that with firmware 1.00.05c drives 2 and 3 absolutely WILL NOT go into standby mode after the specified period of non activity. I have raised a ticket with Thecus and opened a thread here:
http://forums.hexus.net/thecus-care-...d-problem.html

I don't believe its a specific problem with the WD20EADS however, more so the N3200 pro + firmware. Could be worse, you could have Seagate 1.5Tb's :P

Anyone know the APM setting these drives ship with, I think a long term problem with these drives will be the high load cycling count caused by aggresive power management and head parking in these drives, they are rated at 300,000 cycles, this can easily be reached in under a year on a NAS with moderate through the day random accesses. Assuming we can get working standby firmware I plan to turn off that feature completely and just have the drives spin down on extended non use.