I tried to add this drive to an actual 3 disks RAIDZ already composed of a WD10EACS-00ZJB0 and a WD10EADS-65L5B1. The performance was horrible.
You can check a similar iostat output showing the long wait times in:
While the other 512-byte sector HDDs were reading/writing at 30MB/s sustained, this EARS model did not exceeded the 1MB/s barrier.
I know for sure that this is related to the 512-byte sector firmware emulation, because the disk works perfectly well if I partition it in a 4k-sector alignment.
The thing is that even in that way, using it in a ZFS RAIDZ configuration the performance is very poor because RAIDZ uses a dynamic stripe size.
The bottom line here is that folks like me, that use different versions of Unix, need the firmware to present the disk as a 4K-sector disk to unleash the full potential of the technology. The OS is already prepared to support that sector size, no need for emulation here.
Could you please release a firmware version with no emulation whatsoever? Just the real thing.
In favor of the WD10EARS I should also add that the disk works perfectly fine if you use it in a non-RAIDZ configuration (like stand-alone or mirrored).
This is the output I just captured while uncompressing a rar file:
In favor of the WD10EARS I should also add that the disk works perfectly fine if you use it in a non-RAIDZ configuration (like stand-alone or mirrored).
This is the output I just captured while uncompressing a rar file:
I know EARS was not designed specifically for RAID but neither EACS or EADS and are working perfectly fine in my RAIDZ for over a year now.
The thing is that the RE3 and RE4 models are not available to my local market and I also I wouldn’t buy those just for an storage home server.
What I and many other *nix users out there would want is a firmware release that directly exposes the 4K sectors without any 512-byte emulation in the middle. We don’t want a future model with that feature, we want the actual disks that we have to function like they should.
Let’s put it like this, if WD is taking in consideration the great majority of persons that use Windows XP and would need to set the jumper on the disk to re-align the I/O, why wouldn’t the *nix users have their non-emulated firmware update?
Some people could be happy “jumpering” their drives and some other flashing them.
Besides, I believe a senior engineer/developer won’t take more than an hour to comment all the unneeded lines in the code and compile a new firmware.
This sounds like an idea for our Ideas Lab. Eventually, everything will be non-emulated 4K anyway. So, maybe you can help get it rolling by suggesting it.