^ i’m running windows 7, from what i read - it should not make any difference for myself. i’m experiencing the same issues with windows xp and windows 7 even on my RMAd drive
do like i did and grab the align utilities. You might have 4096 sectors and not know it. Given that these drives AREN’T labeled as such I suppose Windows 7 can’t really do its magic like it can on drives it knows are advanced format(EARS models)
“do like i did and grab the align utilities. You might have 4096 sectors and not know it. Given that these drives AREN’T labeled as such I suppose Windows 7 can’t really do its magic like it can on drives it knows are advanced format(EARS models)”
i’ll try it. going to take an hour or so to transfer 2tb of data to my backup server, but worth a shot :smiley:
Hello.
I have problems with my WD15EADS-00R80 also. Bought it in november 2009 . The pc where i was using it was shut down since march this year, so the disk was use mereley 5 months.
Few days ago i installed win7 on that box and start using it again. this morning i decided to write something on the drive and 30 mins later the second partition dissapear.
Problem is that i have some family pictures on the second partition of the drive that i really wanna recover. I set the OPT1 jumper also few minutes ago but the **bleep** partition doesn’t appear back.
Any advice how should i try to recover the family photos ? Really don’t care about the other data .
I run DLGDIAG 5.04f - Data Lifeguard Diagnostics and the message was :
"DRQ TIMEOUT
ERROR/STATUS CODE: 0135"
anyone knows what this code means ?
data request timeout is what it means literally. What it means in relation to your drive’s health I’ve not a clue. I’d wager its not a good sign though.
I tried the option with the 7th and 8th jumper and worked fine 
At this moment the drive is fast
Is anyone else able to confirm if setting Jumpers 7 and 8 make the drive 512byte sectors, or is it the WD software that does it, or do both options need to be used ?.
I have one drive showing 3072 bytes per physical sectors and it’s giving me endless issues as a raid-0 array. The other drive coupled up with it is 512bytes per physical sector, both are EARS models but with different firmware revisions.
Was there any solution to this problem? I have 5x WD15EADS-00P8B0. The past week I have been fighting with my file server with these drives on why the read/write speeds are so slow. First I attributed it to my Dual P3 1GHz with 1GB RAM hardware. It ran FreeNAS. Then I stuck the drives in a P4 2.4GHz with 2GB of DDR on a Highpoint RocketRAID 2210 controller with FreeNAS. Then I still got slow transfers. So I installed Windows Server 2003 with SP2 just to see if it was a driver issue or something with FreeBSD. Still no go. The transfer rates fluctuate wildly from 30MB/sec down to 1MB/sec.
I am running them in a RAID10. There is no background initilization going on and nothing else is reading/writing to the array. I don’t know what else to do but RMA the drives. Why do I have to go to this hassle WD?
I had this same problem with one from a set of 4 WD15EVDS disks, which from what I understand, are very similar to the WD15EADS. After pulling out my hair for several days while reading articles and forums about the subject, I finally found a solution that worked for me.
Here is a rough outline of the steps:
1) Create a DOS boot disk on a USB drive.
2) Copy WDTLER.EXE to the boot disk. This can be found in a zip file which I found in the following two places:
http://zacuke.com/index.php/2009/05/western-digital-wdtlerzip/
http://www.gohighvoltage.com/forum/index.php?topic=50.0
3) Reboot to DOS with USB boot disk with only the WD drives that you want to fix connected.
4) Run “WDTLER.EXE /R1 /W1” to set the TLER to 1 second for both read and write.
5) Reboot
Or you could follow these instructions:
http://shifteightgeneration.com/content/wdtler-fix-tler-setting-wd-desktop-hard-drives
This is a fairly involved process so I tried it as a last resort but it fixed my problem. Interestingly my drive did not start to show errors due to the shortened error recovery time, as I was expecting. My theory is that the WD firmware is flawed and enabling TLER somehow works around the problem or at least shortens the delay.
I should note that I tried the jumper tricks suggested here with out reformatting my disks and they did not work for me. I suspect that those who did have apparent success with the jumper tricks may have also reformatted their drives which may be the real reason the problem went away, at least temporarily. This problem did not appear until after using the disks for several months.
I hope that helps some people out of this nasty problem.
I’ve been going mental for the past 2 months trying to figure out what’s causing this and now I know! The disks in my PC were fine for 7-8 months before this so god only know what WD did to screw up on this one.
I’ve got:
WD15EADS_00P8B0 x3
WD20EARS x1
My boot disk is one of the WD15EADS drives and I’ve mainly noticed the system hanging with “not responding” issues when browing the internet amongst other things, then all of a sudden it’ll spring into life. This happens several times per hour. Have tried 2 PSUs, 2 motherboards, 2 CPUs and a reinstall of Windows 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit).
Has anyone tried the above “WDTLER.EXE” fix outlined above or is that only for raid systems?
Does changing the idle time help with this?
I really don’t want to go down the RMA route if I can avoid it as all 4 of my drives are totally full.
Cheers.
Binman_UK wrote:
I’ve been going mental for the past 2 months trying to figure out what’s causing this and now I know! The disks in my PC were fine for 7-8 months before this so god only know what WD did to screw up on this one.
I’ve got:
WD15EADS_00P8B0 x3
WD20EARS x1
My boot disk is one of the WD15EADS drives and I’ve mainly noticed the system hanging with “not responding” issues when browing the internet amongst other things, then all of a sudden it’ll spring into life. This happens several times per hour. Have tried 2 PSUs, 2 motherboards, 2 CPUs and a reinstall of Windows 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit).
Has anyone tried the above “WDTLER.EXE” fix outlined above or is that only for raid systems?
Does changing the idle time help with this?
I really don’t want to go down the RMA route if I can avoid it as all 4 of my drives are totally full.
Cheers.
I don’t know that I can help you with this, but I’m noticing probably 2 issues with what you’re experiencing:
1) The WD20EARS drive is an advance format drive. If you don’t have the partition aligned properly, then it will be as slow as molasses. However, this will really only be an issue if you’re using XP. Vista and 7 will automatically align the drive, correctly, when you partition and format it with them. When you installed 7, did you delete the original partition, and repartition and format the drive with 7?
2) The WD15EADS drives are not RAID drives. Therefore, they will have a tendency to drop out of RAID if they go into error correction mode. WDTLER.EXE was not originally created for these drives. So, attempting to use it to time limit them for error recovery may have unknown undesireable effects. Also, TLER.EXE has nothing to do with changing the idle time on those drives.
I would consider downloading our DLG Diagnostics to test each drive individually to make sure that there’s nothing wrong with them, before sending them in for replacement.
Cheers for the reply.
None of my drives are in a RAID configuration. One of the EADS drives is used for the boot disk and the other 3 (EADS, EADS, EARS) are used for data storage. The top one is the boot disk. I’ve inclided the load cycle numbers as they’re quite high (e.g. 52,785 on boot disk), which is in keeping with other people’s experiences:
WDC WD15EADS-00P8B0 01.00A01 (CE31 = 52785) - S/N: WMAVU01* - Manufactured 02/09/2009 in Malaysia
WDC WD15EADS-00P8B0 01.00A01 (D7D0 = 55248) - S/N: WMAVU01* - Manufactured 02/09/2009 in Malaysia
WDC WD15EADS-00P8B0 01.00A01 (3A61 = 14945) - S/N: WMAVU01* - Manufactured 02/09/2009 in Malaysia
WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1 80.00A80 (F8A8 = 63656) - S/N: WCAVY25* - Manufactured 10/02/2010 in Thialand
In answer to #1: All the drives, including the EARS one were blank when I received them and I created/formatted partitions in Windows 7 32-bit. Just to eliminate anything to do with alignment, I ran both WD align tools on the drives and the EADS ones were shown as unsupported and the EARS one was aligned correctly.
In answer to #2: I see that the TLER change is for RAID so shouldn’t affect me.
If I only plug one drive into the motherboard (the WD15EADS boot disk) I still experience this issue. I get it with the Windows SATA drivers, the AMD drivers, if I set the drive to emulate IDE in the BIOS and with a separate Silicon Image PCI controller. I ran the DLG Diagnostics test and it reported no errors. I simply do not understand, considering I’ve replaced nearly all the hardware in my PC trying to fix this, how it can still be occurring.
I ran windows performance monitor during one of these hangs (lasted approx 5 mins) and the disk queue graph is simply all over the place. See below:
I notice that other people have had issues with “slowdown” and “hanging” with these drives (and specifically the WDC WD15EADS-00P8B0 01.00A01 ones that I have).
Any additional help much appreciated. What’s the deal with sending back drives that have an ok SMART status? Would it be accepted? It’s not as if a SMART check factors in any firmware problems associated with the drives.
Cheers.
It appears that the only real answer is that WD’s quality control of these drives was awful, and quite possibly it is simply a bad design. WD Customer Support on this issue may have improved, so you might be lucky with getting a replacement, but they continue to deny fault or any problem with the drives. Meanwhile, the prices on the drives has dropped to $80 in only a few short months. Seems they are having a real problem offloading the POS drives.
Don’t believe the nonsense about RAID. All reputable drives should RAID w/o issues, unless the firmware is specifically crippled by the manufacturer. Long story short, don’t let them strong arm you into paying much higher prices for drives that are basically identical in terms of hardware but do not have the crippled/limited firmware. My guess is that SSD market is having an impact on demand, so manufacturers area attempting to elevate prices by crippling the firmware and demanding more money for “enterprise” performance. I know that a few companies are considering a lawsuit against price-fixing practices.
Good luck, and hopefully your replacement will work. You can use the advance replacement option to have new drives shipped to you first, and 30 days “should” be enough time to copy off the data from the old ones. I would highly suggest that you have data backups, as it seems increasingly likely that the WDEARS drives will puke and your data will be lost. I had used WD products for some time, but I’ve lost the faith. It is appaling when you look at customer reviews of many drives these days…usually 1 in 4 has problems. Meanwhile, >90% of folks love their new processor, graphic card, etc. Some of the SSD drives seem to be keeping customers happy, but if varies from manufacturer and model. For large data storage of important data, RAID not only makes sense, but it is practically mandatory. Paying 3x the price for “RAID capable” drives from the manufacturer does not guarantee data integrity. It is still cheaper to buy 2 of the “value” drives and mirror them than pay extortion fees for the “enterprise” drives. Many have had success with other manufacturers in the 1.5 and 2 TB sizes…just shop around and look at the aggregate customer reviews for that model.
Again, don’t believe the nonsense about RAID, and you have a right to demand better performance from your drives.
Cheers for the reply. Mine 4 drives aren’t actually RAIDed at the moment but I’ve given in and RMA’d my O/S WD15EADS disk and I’ll see how it goes.
I can’t tell if the other 3 disks are faulty… I guess I’ll find out when I clone the O/S disk and put the replacement in. Hopefully the others are fine.
The advance RMA should arrive either tomorrow or early next week and it’s shown as WD15EADS-11P8B1 (WMAVU17*). Hopefully that version of the firmware/controller is a bit better! Seems quite new as there wasn’t many hits when I googled for it.
I’ll report back with my findings anyway.
I own two WD15EADS-00P8B0 (FW 01.00A0) SN WMAVU01* marked 03 SEP 2009 Malaysia. One, used infrequently as a backup drive, seems to work fine so far.
The other, that was used as a desktop drive under XP, was causing long delays (several minutes with the drive active, and a perceptible head re-calibrate noise). This occured many times and was reproduced on 5 clean installs of XP SP3 (e.g. when keying-in the first user name), on two machines with different SATA chipsets. Similar testing of the “good” drive found no problem whatsoever. In one of the test of the “bad” drive the XP partition was made to start at LBA 64 instead of 63, it confirmed that the issue is not solved by 4kiB alignment.
Waiting long enough seems to have “worked” in all cases, since no error was ever logged in Windows system logs, and no data loss was apparent. There was no alarming SMART data, and although the SMART warning was enabled in BIOS it never triggered (which is a negation of the purpose of SMART). The drive initialy passed all tests I submitted it to, including WD’s Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows and DOS.
Security erase (the closest thing I know to a low level format) does not cure the problem. I noticed that it is longer on my “bad” drive than on my “good” one (5h 28’ 13" versus 5h 05’ 36", repeatable within few seconds); this DATA DESTRUCTIVE test is performed with MHDD (bundled with System Rescue CD), PWD (to set a simple password), FASTERASE (requires the same password, gives startup time), WAIT (gives end time).
In the end, on suggestion of WD support, I re-ran again DLGDIAG5 for DOS (here Diag504fCD), and the short test failed , twice (later on, it worked again). I found that DLGDIAG5 records its results in the drive. The log is not erased by the drive’s security erase. The last 5 entries or so can be viewed by running DLGDIAG5 as a command-line tool from DOS: DLGDIAG5 -S -G
Even before that failure, WD support suggested, based on my detailed problem description, that I could RMA the drive. I now did. Update: I’m told it will be replaced by a WD15EADS-11P8B2.
Drive failures and even bad production batches occur, and I can’t tell if there is more or less with WD than with other brands. What’s very bad is that SMART never triggered, after so many retries, and even worst after the drive had failed tests. I’m thinking of preventively asking for firmware upgrade or RMA of my other WD15EADS-00P8B0 and four WD10EADS with FW 01.00A0, although all five work fine for now. A drive that has dysfunctional SMART is defective even if it does not yet loose data: this is bound to happen some day, and you want to have a good chance to learn it in advance thru SMART, wich is an integral part of the WD1xEADS advertised feature set.
I was wondering if i can RMA my old one, wd15eads. It’s slow as hell. my old hd do a better job then this one. my read test with HD Tune give 4mb/s max. I did use Data Lifeguard Diagnostic, it’s pass 
does anyone have any luck if we can RMA this WD15EADS ?? or can we upgrade the HD for a new model, i’m ready to paid the different.
I’ve advance RMA’d my WD15EADS-00P8B0 and they’re sending me a WD15EADS-11P8B1 as a replacement. Will let you know how it goes.
Dream3r’s problem is different from mine. Hdtunepro_460_trial with default settings shows overs 100 MB/s max when reading from my “good” WD15EADS-00P8B0, and usually did the same for my “bad” one (now RMAed).
Such slow max speed suggest a software problem or a SATA attachment problem. Maybe
-
temporarilly boot Windows in “safe” mode (press F8 at boot) and redo the test
-
check BIOS settings, perhaps use ATA emulation rather than AHCI
-
change SATA cable
-
disable the drive’s high speed PHY by jumpering pins 5/6, see this FAQ
Is there any solution to this yet?
[root@server004 ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 35556 MB in 1.99 seconds = 17825.45 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 6 MB in 6.42 seconds = 956.58 kB/sec
[root@server004 ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 24436 MB in 2.00 seconds = 12239.86 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 6 MB in 34.36 seconds = 178.83 kB/sec
[root@server004 ~]#
