WD Datacenter Gold 2TB Drives

WD Legacy Products My Net Networking Devices
1

Hi

I have an older Dell MD1000 Array, which has a 3 GB/s backplane.
It Dell says it officially support 2TB drives, so my question is:

Does anyone know whether the WD Datacenter Gold 2TB drives (WD2005FBYZ) which has 6 GB/s interface, have the ability to scale down automatically to 3 GB/s when put in a device that only has a 3BG/s interface?

Thanks in advance.

2

Hi,
Some arrays have the ability to negotiate with the device and agree the speed to use and some do not. Also some drives ignore this process and continue to insist on running at 6Gb/s.
I have spent many hours investigating this issue as I needed to replace some old SATA II drives and the array interface was not happy with the WD Gold 6Gb.s drives.
But there is a fix!!
Put a jumper on pins 5-6 on the rear of the drive and it will work in 3Gb/s mode.
It may not work for all WD Golds but certainly does for the WD2005FBYZ.
If you look at rear of drive, the text diagram below should help.

power sata 8642
----------# #---- ::::
7531

3

All HDD they negotiate automatically On-system-Boot, the supported due the motherboard SATA specification.

WD Gold complete user manual, its clear … never connect any jumpers at the back.
These jumpers are for factory test operations.