How does one go about obtaining a spare 4TB drive for a Sentinel DS6100? The designated compatible drive is shown as out of stock in the WD Online Store. Answer ID 9443 in the online WD Knowledge Base says if purchasing from a location other than the WD Store, the specific drive part number should be used. In boldface type marked critical, the customer is warned that the Drive Part Number must inlcude any suffix. In this case the part number with suffix would be WD4000F9MZ-76NVPL0. I have not been able to find an available drive with this part number. Any pointers to a source, or information about a newer available WD drive that would be compatible notwithanding the knowledge base entry?
You might look this over
Thanks for the link reference. From this it appears that there is not only the issue of what drives are compatible in terms of performance and reliablity, but also what drives will the whitelisting code allow to be run. Looking at the WD directory, I see a wddrivelist.msi file from which I can extract DriveList.xml, which shows not only the F9MZ 4TB drive shown in the compatibility list on the web, but also another F9MZ drive with a different suffix and also the F9YZ drive shown on the web list as compatible with the DX4000 and RX4100. It also includes on the preferred list a 4TB Hitachi / HGST Deskstar model. (I don’t see any HGST models on the compatibility list on the web.)
Since my current objective is to obtain a couple of spares rather than deal with a failure, I am not at present ready to try to modify the whitelist, being unsure of what potential pitfalls may exist. Finding replacement drives seems harder than it should be, especially for a server that was announced only two years ago I think.
Can someone explain further where this whitelist lives? I have a DS5100, and like others have posted, it appears to be impossible to find new, compatible HDDs for these models. I don’t even mind paying a small premium over market price to buy “official” HDDs from WDC, but WDC no longer sells them. This means my Sentinel has limited expandability and a limited lifespan.
I searched the OS drive for “whitelist” and found nothing. I searched my Restore files, and there’s no whitelist.xml. There isn’t even a WDRESTORE directory; there’s just a big boot.wim file.
sorry took a while. Not sure what you do with it though…
C:\Program Files\Western Digital\Western Digital Drive List\DriveList.xml
I guess the original suggestion was to modify the list in case of a O/S reinstall via WD virtual ISO CDROM. I unserstood both the whitelist files on the USB stick (created via virtual CDROM - WDRECOVERY folder) as well as the whitelist on the virtual CD ROM shall be modified. I have to admit I made an attempt without success but perhaps I made an error in the procedure (the hard disk was still recognized as “bad”, i.e. not in the whitelist).
What I also noticed is that on the last Sentinel sold the list of compatible HD includes hard drives s/n which are still sold (the WD enterprise HD), and not only the ones specifically dedicated to Sentinel NAS (identical, they differ just by the last digit in the s/n) which are now not sold anymore even if you are willing to pay a premium. Unfortunately the ISO recovery CD only include the list with the WD specific HD, which means that you have a failure out of warrany you can basically throw away your unit.
Very difficult to understand why a company like WD is not even willing to provide minimum modifications to allow usage of the Sentinel with available hard drives.
Hmmm. My DS5100 unit doesn’t have the file. Or even that directory:
I searched the HDD for “09N20L0”, e.g. the suffix on several of the supported drives, and that turns up nothing. Searching regedit for that same string also returns nothing.
So apparently the whitelist is no longer stored as plain text.
just curious what version you have. All my folders are dated a year newer. Search for drivelist.xml ?
Interesting! I’m on the phone with WDC Tier 2 support right now, and he is RDPed into my box at this very moment, very puzzled that he also can’t find this directory. My box reports Version 2.1.8.30, but if we click Check for Updates, it claims “No updates available,” which is odd considering that 2.1.8.30 <<< 2.2.10.18.
have no clue if the update servers are still live
I would hope so, since my box is still under warranty!
But the 2.2.10.18 update is available, so we pushed it to the box as a zip file, and we’re trying to “Update from file” now. We’ve let it sit for 20 minutes with no sign of progress, so we’re going to let it sit all weekend and see if it’s finished on Monday.
Then we’ll see if there’s a C:\Program Files\Western Digital\Western Digital Drive List\DriveList.xml to edit.
I think you leave it zipped.
Yeah, that’s what the instructions say. I don’t see how it’s supposed to take 45 minutes, though. The whole update file is < 90 MB.
But I’m going to let it sit for 48 hours.
If you unzip it somewhere there is a wddrivelist.msi
I think you can just run each msi or try the setup in there if nothing has happened on Monday
Look in c:\wd\logs for an update log
If you unzip it somewhere there is a wddrivelist.msi
I think you can just run each msi or try the setup in there if nothing has happened on Monday
Look in c:\wd\logs for an update log
The good news is that the update completed sometime over the weekend. My box is now showing version 2.2.10.18, and there is now a whitelist at:
C:\Program Files\Western Digital\Western Digital Drive List\DriveList.xml
The bad news is that I still have an incompatible drive, but for a totally different reason. When WDC promised me a whitelist add, the support rep suggested I go to store.wdc.com, select Internal HDDs, select Datacenter, and then the WD Re series, where I was supposed to select the 2 TB model, part number WD2000FYYZ.
Since I didn’t know whether whitelist mod was going to be flexible or a one-time deal, I decided to go large and buy the 4 TB drive from that same page. I received the 4 TB drive the next day (good on WDC’s distribution), but when I got on the phone with the WDC rep to update my whitelist today, we find out it’s a SAS drive, which is obviously hardware-incompatible with my unit.
WTH? If you click on the link above, the 2 TB selection gives you a SATA drive. The 6 TB selection gives you a SATA drive. But the 4 TB selection gives you a SAS drive. These are all on the same product page. ?!?!?!?!
Which of these is not like the other . . .
I don’t know how WDC thinks this is a good idea to have two different interfaces presented as the same product line. I gave some feedback to WDC on this.
So I have an RMA and prepaid return label for my useless 4 TB SAS drive. Unfortunately I can’t buy the equivalent 4 TB SATA drive from WDC.com, because they don’t offer it. :rolleyes: so I bought two of them from amazon.
I should get those on Wednesday, and then I’ll call WDC support back and ask them to edit my whitelist. (The reason I’m having them do it is so that it’s a fully supported mod, at least while my box is under warranty).
The other good news is that the tech support rep told me that a software update is “in the works” to dispense with the whitelist entirely. He couldn’t promise me a release date, but he said it’s coming.
So this may all work out in the end, but it will have been a tremendous PITA to get there.
So the whitelist has been edited by WDC, and it appears to be very straightforward addition of a few lines. Here’s the original file and the edited version. The only change appears to be:
<Drive Model="WDC WD4000FYYZ-01UL1B2"
Description="Enterprise Storage 4 TB"
Size="4000787030016"
Category="Preferred"
ItemProfile="EnterpriseStorageProfile65" />
Once I copied in the new DriveList.xml, my new drives were recognized as Preferred:
`
and I was able to increase the size of my Storage Space.
Now if I could only get the !@#$@$%@#~$ Backup Service running again . . . 
Thanks for the info
The client backup service?
Yes, the client backup service isn’t running, and when I try to restart it, it says “it started and then stopped.” I’ve rebooted the server 4-5 times, and that doesn’t help. I attempted to manually run the cleanup tasks, and that reports that it finishes in just a few seconds (so it obviously didn’t do anything), and I still can’t start the backup service.
Grrrrr.
