WDEARS in Raid 1 - Alignment tools Dont Work

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

so i bought 2 WDEARS drives (2TB) to upgrade a raid 1 array in an xp machine. 

trying to use the WD software to do the boundry alignment, but it wont recognize the drives if they are in raid 1 mode (this is using an ASUS M2N32-SLI deluxe motherboard with NVidia 590 SLI chip set).

so i split the raid, and the software see the drives fine.  but when i recreate a raid partition it breaks the boundry settings because it forms a new drive/partition.

once i create the raid 1 array from the 2 drives, the software (true image wd edition and wd align windows) cant see them.

so i created a bootable dvd while the raid was split, thinking that might work.  boot with the dvd, but same thing, it cant see the raid array.

other software can see the raid drives (like Hard Disk Sentinel for example, GParted another example) so why cant this?

this has been a nightmare, since nothing works and the performance is terrible. and none of the wd software seems to work on the arrays.

any suggestions?

i dont want to use the jumper since i need more than one partition.

2

My suggestion will be to use other drives.

The WD softwares won’t work because they are expecting your drives to work on their own, no matter what you do it’s not going to work for what you want while you run Windows XP.

3

i agree with your solution; trouble is i already bought these, and return is difficult/impossible.

so i need a solution…one way i suppose is not to raid them, but that was the point of getting two!

and their web site says they work in raid 1 and raid 0, so …

4

Again, this is because you run XP.

You could build the RAID and still use 4K if you upgrade to Vista or 7. You would not even need to use the align softwares, just a GPT partition with 4K allocation size will be enough…

5

too bad they didnt make this clearer in their literature.

i was able to return one of the drives; im putting the other in a non raid environment now.

interestingly enough, even when not raided, the software cant see it if it is configured as a raid disk; so i disabled raid entirely, and it now sees the drive.

so told it to align it, and it came back with yet another error.  so even though the software can now recognize the drive etc, it still dont work. 

it seems xp and these drives arent ready for prime time. 

ps; im not going to upgrade a system just to make a disk drive work.  better to get another drive.  this is a game server, with no need for upgraded os.