WD RED Drive not recognizing in Freenas or MiniXL

[firedis01]

General problem
I recently had an issue where two of my drives were listed in degraded state. I replaced them and while one drive was recognized, the other was not.

Hardware/OS:
As a setup I have the FreeNas Mini XL and current operating system level is FreeNAS-11.1-U7. The drives are 6.0 TB WD RED drives. Original hard drive were model WD60EFRX and the new model is WD60EFAX.

Steps I started taking to replace the drives:
1. Identified the two drives that had an issue.

2. Pulled one drive and replaced it with new drive.
3. Started machine and followed steps in: Notes of a Programmer: Replacing Corrupt Hard Drive for FreeNAS
4. Things went ok.
5. Pulled the second drive and replaced it.
6. Started the machine and did not see the latest drive.

Steps I took to troubleshoot:

1. Ran

Code:

geom disk list

and it does not show up. Also checked

egrep 'ada[0-9]' /var/run/dmesg.boot

and nothing.
2. Turned system off. Tried swapping disks around thinking it might be a bad bay or cable. The new hard drive was still not recognized.
3. I had an old WD 160 GB drive lying around and decided to plug that in to see if it worked. It showed up.
4. So thinking I had a bad drive, I ordered a new hard drive thinking it was bad. Got it took the 160GB drive out and put the new drive in and the new drive isn't showing up.
5. Took one of the other 8 working drives out and left the drive that wasn't working in and still did not show up.


Is it possible I just have really bad luck and two drives that I got are bad? Or is there some configuration thing that I'm missing while trying to replace these drives?

Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Kris Moore]

First of all, you want to get rid of that WD60EFAX drive, that is one of the ones using SMR technology which will not work properly with ZFS / FreeNAS. Second I'd recommend updating to at least 11.3 first, since a lot of issues were resolved since the 11.1 days, and the drive detection may be one of them.

 

[firedis01]

Kris, Thank you. I updated to 11.3 and that didn't resolve the issue. I'm going to go try to find my original model drives. All I can say is wow... Buyer beware—that 2TB-6TB “NAS” drive you’ve been eyeing might be SMR | Ars Technica.

 

[firedis01]

Kris, thanks for the information. I did replace the drives and everything is working fine now.