I have a ASUS P7P55D-E Pro motherboard, i3 processor and 4gb DDR3 RAM with Win7 Ultimate 32-bit as OS. My system is only used as a mediacenter, and mainly records TV. My TV is recorded onto an external SATA enclosure called Sharkoon 5-bay raid box.
Currently I have 3x WD20EARX in the Sharkoon enclosure set up as RAID 5. unfortunately, the drives are causing many many problems. I checked all other possibilities (from motherboard, BIOS, SATA controllers, enclosure settings …, but recently tried with different HDD’s and all problems were solved. So basically WD20EARX does not work in RAID5. It is most likely the ‘sleep’ state of the drives that are causing Win7 to crash.
What happens is, and quite a few people are having this problem if you search on the web, when the win7 is woken up from sleep and the HDD’s in the enclosure start to spin again, Win7 starts giving serious issues and becomes very slow. So if the HDD’s are still spinning, there are NO problems.
Furthermore, a cold reboot is the only way to get the PC back into it’s normal functionning state.
Below a more detailled list of issues that occur due to the HDD’s after resuming from sleep:
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the CPU LED-indicator stays permanently on
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the load time of the desktop after login is significantly longer (a minute instead of a couple of seconds)
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my sata CD/DVD drive is no longer accessible
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the system becomes unstable and will try to reboot itself. This actually makes things worse because this results in a black screen (with blinking cursor)
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the only way to recover from this is a cold boot, everything works fine after this! A regular reset results in the above.
PS: As this PC is used only as a Mediacenter, there is no other software on the PC, it is perfectly clean and runs only on drivers of ASUS.
I would appreciate WD to do the following:
a) give 3 different HDD which do not spin down (non green caviar) and thus can be used in RAID5 properly (recommend)
b) or refund the 3 drives
=> in any case, they should update the product page to inform users that this product is not compatible with RAID5. Obviously, as this was the sole purpose of the drives, I would have choses alternative HDD’s if there was a notice that it isn’t compatible.
I’m afraid in the meantime, that my mediacenter cannot be used, and that the problems caused by the drives, could also damage other parts of the system. (Sata connected Blu Ray drive is also starting to act slow/strange after the HDD’s are awaken from sleep!!!
