RAID 1 issues

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Hi,

My older 2 TB WD Caviar Green drive died in a RAID 1 configuration (the other drive is a WD Green too-- both are WD20EARS-00MVWB0 models). As a result, I bought a new 2 TB WD Red drive (WDC20EFRX-68EUZN0).

I’m trying to sync data, but Windows  10 is giving me an error “all disks holding extents for a given volume must have the same sector size”. It turns out that the WD Green drive returns “512” as it’s physical and logical sector size, even thought it’s an advanced storage drive and is actually physicall 4096! The new Red drive returns “4096” for it’s physical sector size. Given this mismatch, Windows throws an error.

How can I resolve this?

Thanks,

Matt

PS: it looks like this thread might be related?  http://community.wd.com/t5/Internal-Drive-Ideas/Release-non-512-byte-sector-emulated-firmware-for-WD-EARS/idi-p/21347

2

I’m just guessing, but I suspect Green reports 512 sectors because many people still use it on XP and other non-AF places, in contrast to Red which is RAID-only.  Maybe this is why WDC states that “Desktop drives are not recommended for use in RAID environments, please consider using WD Red hard drives for desktop RAID environments or WD datacenter hard drives for rackmount or large RAID configurations.”

3

Thanks for the follow up.

1/ Green is supposed to only report 512 on XP machines. See  http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/storage/westerndigital/advfmt/EARS.jpg

2/ Red wasn’t available when I bought my Greens (January 2011).

So is there a solution here other than throwing out a perfectly fine Green drive and being forced to buy another red?

4

  1. A bug!

  2. I did not intend to be snippy. I figured you bought the two drives years apart, but unfortunately AF got in the way.

I do not know a solution, sorry. The problem is that you really want the Green to report 4096 sectors. My only suggestion would be to contact WDC support and ask if a firmware update is available for the Green to properly report 4096.

5

“I did not intend to be snippy.” No worries-- you’re being helpful, I really appreciate it.

Good advice on contacting support, I’ll reach out. Thanks again for taking the time to reply. I’ve been racking my head against this problem for a couple of days now so really appreciate a follow up from someone. :slight_smile: