WD Red Drives (WD20EFRX) on WHS v1 - Jumper Settings

Internal Drives WD Red
1

Hi

I have a Windows Home Server v1 with seven WD drives (variety of EURS, EARS and EARX). As all of these are advanced format drives i have always jumpered pins 7 and 8 to address the advanced format incompatibility of WHSv1.

They have been excellent! Now i want to add two more drives and like the sound of the WD Red Drives for NAS (WD20EFRX).

Q. Do these drives support jumpering of pins 7 and 8 to disable advanced format?

Thanks

2

Yes,

I spoke to someone in WD and they do.

3

Hi

Thanks for your response. How sure are you about your source? 

Since i posted, WD in New Zealand came back to me saying “the jumper alignment feature is no longer supported in these drives”. Though it is entirely possible that they just don’t know.

4

Just an update, for anyone following this thread…

I opted instead to go for 2 x WD20EZRX. WD NZ reported that the jumpers were no longer required as it would “Auto align” but as i could not see this confirmed elsewhere i jumpered them anyway.

I then connected them to a Windows 7 box to initialize them (MBR), before finally putting them in their final home, a Lian Li EX-50B that is connected via eSata to my Acer Easystore H340 Windows Home Server v1 box. 

They work great. I checked their speed and was impressed to find they were faster than the WD20EARS, WD20EURS and WD20EARXs in the config.

This gives me a total 7 x 2TB + 1 x 1TB for a total disk space of almost of 14TB.