HI LB_WD,
The utility (WD Red SMART load/Unload utility 3.5" Drive- wd5741.exe
http://downloads.wdc.com/sata/wd5741.exe) You linked is a firmware
updater wich says for bios v80 and v82 both that they are not needed to be
updated, so that is not what I was looking for.
I have 10 WD RED in my server - 4 of them has v80 - 6 of them v82 BIOSes.
My problem is that the drives are not behaving the same (APM wise) with the
same WDidle3 settings and it can cause sync problems when different bios
drives are sitting on the same SAS lane. Therefore, I had to separate the
drives to different SAS ports and it seems to working stable now (FreeBSD).
If all the drives are WD RED 3 with the same type-name they should be
firmware compatible so there should be an updater to bring them to the same
firmware level. If they are physically different drives with the same model
name then I do not have to say anything. Thank you for trying to help
anyway…
