WD RED drives not spinning up?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Hi, all

when a colleague wanted to upgrade the 4 disks in his home FreeNAS to 4 TB each, WD was the first brand I checked. The "RED" series seemed to be exactly what we needed. Sacrificing performance for low power consumption was perfectly OK for a home system, 24x7 certified, ... deal.

OK, scrub pool once more to be absolutely sure, yank one drive (RAIDZ2), replace, then,

Code:

gpart create -s gpt ada0
gpart add -a 1m -s 4g -t freebsd-swap ada0
gpart add -a 1m -t freebsd-zfs ada0
zpool replace zfs 6290575096370306780 ada0p2

Resilvering went without a hitch, but this morning I found:

Code:

    NAME                        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    zfs                         DEGRADED     0     0     0
      raidz2-0                  DEGRADED     0     0     0
        replacing-0             UNAVAIL      0     0     0
          6290575096370306780   UNAVAIL      0     0     0  was /dev/gptid/d2e7908a-41a7-11e3-ada8-1cc1de188788
          16410848062825837533  REMOVED      0     0     0  was /dev/ada0p2
        ada1p2                  ONLINE       0     0     0
        ada2p2                  ONLINE       0     0     0
        ada3p2                  ONLINE       0     0     0

and

Code:

Nov 25 23:03:02 freenas-je kernel: (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): WRITE_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 61 80 a0 c4 23 40 b3 00 00 00 00 00
Nov 25 23:03:02 freenas-je kernel: (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): CAM status: ATA Status Error
Nov 25 23:03:02 freenas-je kernel: (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): ATA status: 41 (DRDY ERR), error: 10 (IDNF )
Nov 25 23:03:02 freenas-je kernel: (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): RES: 41 10 a0 c4 23 40 b3 00 00 00 00
Nov 25 23:03:02 freenas-je kernel: (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): Retrying command
Nov 25 23:03:02 freenas-je kernel: (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): FLUSHCACHE48. ACB: ea 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00
Nov 25 23:03:02 freenas-je kernel: (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): CAM status: Command timeout
Nov 25 23:03:02 freenas-je kernel: (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): Retrying command
Nov 25 23:03:02 freenas-je kernel: ada0 at ahcich0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0
Nov 25 23:03:02 freenas-je kernel: ada0: <WDC WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 82.00A82> s/n WD-WCC4ENNRS0ZK detached
Nov 25 23:03:02 freenas-je kernel: (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): Periph destroyed

(shortened for brevity, same error message with a couple of retries ...)

So ...

any idea, what's going on here? I searched the forum for the "RED" drives but only found they *should* be OK. I suspect the drive is spinning down after some idle time and not coming back up.

This link was mentioned in one of the threads:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=619&sid=201&lang=en

Has anyone used this utility and can share some experience? Can I disable spin down altogether with this? The documentation only mentions increasing the idle timeout.

In the FreeNAS UI spin down is set to never. The FreeNAS version is 9.2.1.8 amd64. System is a ProLiant Micro Server N36L with 16G of ECC RAM. Drive label reads SATA/64MB Cache WD40EFRX NASware 3.0.

Any helpful suggestions (other than returning the drives ;-) appreciated.

Thanks
Patrick

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Answering myself ... I just found this thread:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hacking-wd-greens-and-reds-with-wdidle3-exe.18171/

We will set up a new FreeNAS system in a spare server with 4 of these new "RED" drives and test the APM = 254 setting first and the wdidle tool with the Ultimate Boot CD second. I'll keep you updated.

Kind regards
Patrick

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Well, this is getting weirder by the day ...

We set APM to 254 - didn't help.
We used WDIDLE3 off the Ultimate Boot CD - didn't help, either.

We found one disk was vibrating way too much for a healthy impression - changed that drive, everything worked. Or so it seemed.
Unfortunately now I cannot tell if the APM setting alone would have been sufficient ...

One day later a second drive failed. And another one. Diagnosed with WD's windows tools as asked by their support - broken. Period.

So, we seem to have received a bad lot - 3 failed drives out of 4, all on RMA, now. What the ...?

So, while we are waiting for the replacement drives, I ordered 5 Seagate ST4000VN000 for the NAS in question. When the new WD drives arrive and if they survive a burn-in of a couple of days, we will repurpose them putting them into 3.5" USB-enclosures for use as a desktop backup (time machine) drive.

Kind regards
Patrick