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[D-Link Multimedia]

ShareCenter Users,
 
We regret to inform you that we can not support Western Digital’s new Desktop disk drives with Advanced Formatting Technology for use in our ShareCenter NAS devices.
 
WD does not recommend (and will not support) the use ANY of their Desktop disk drives in NAS devices, including their new drives with the Advanced Formatting Technology.  WD has no intention of rectifying this issue for NAS support.
 
According to WD, even if we were to solve the issues caused by their Advanced Formatting Technology in the standard mode, these drives may still cause problems when used in RAID configurations (especially with RAID 5).
 
This issue is not unique to D-Link nor the ShareCenter product line but rather relates to WD’s strategy moving forward.
 
WD will only guarantee the compatibility of their Enterprise disk drives with NAS devices, as they are not integrated with their Advanced Formatting Technology.
 
As a result, we will NOT support the use of any WD disk drive with Advanced Formatting Technology.
 
Thank you for your understanding.  Please do not hesitate to contact our team directly with any questions or concerns.

[jackbreuer]

How do I know if my WD drives use this "advanced format"? I have just bought two 1.5TB Green Caviar disks for a RAID1 configuration. I havent seen any notes regarding the format technology on the WD website during my 5min research.
Regardless of the format question, the WD harddisks seem to work fine. Would you still recommend exchanging them by other disks?

[sulloway]

Hi, I'm ready to buy a NAS-321 but having caught the forum posts regarding compatable SATA drives, as well as the D Link warnings about Compatability in their sales information,; I have tried and failed to find any published information on the D Link Web site except posts here in the forum.

Where can I find this list on the web site.? The link in the sales brochure says "see support". All that did was take me to the support screen. No mention of Drive Compatability. A search using various key words failed me. So what Seagate SATA or WD SATA drives, THAT ARE ON THE LIST,can I use? or how can I access the list on the D link Web Site?

Thanks!

Woody

[D-Link Multimedia]

Hi, I'm ready to buy a NAS-321 but having caught the forum posts regarding compatable SATA drives, as well as the D Link warnings about Compatability in their sales information,; I have tried and failed to find any published information on the D Link Web site except posts here in the forum.

Where can I find this list on the web site.? The link in the sales brochure says "see support". All that did was take me to the support screen. No mention of Drive Compatability. A search using various key words failed me. So what Seagate SATA or WD SATA drives, THAT ARE ON THE LIST,can I use? or how can I access the list on the D link Web Site?

Thanks!

Woody

A good reference site for information is http://sharecenter.dlink.com.

Most if not all seagate drives are supported. WD Drives are mostly supported however drives that use Advanced Formatting, I believe the EADS models, are not supported.

[Ryder]

A good reference site for information is http://sharecenter.dlink.com.

Most if not all seagate drives are supported. WD Drives are mostly supported however drives that use Advanced Formatting, I believe the EADS models, are not supported.

D-L M, I believe the last 4 letters of the advanced formatting drives from WD are EARS, or at least that's what mine were. I received the drives and there were stickers on the stat bags about how to properly format them under given circumstances.

Hope this helps,

Ryder

[another_user]

Frankly your position of not supporting the new 4k sector drives makes no sense from a technical standpoint and is a poor business decision.

Western Digital, as you correctly point out, does not support RAID use of ANY of their non-Enterprise drives. As far as I know, that's also true of every other major manufacturer although WD has taken this to an extreme by eliminating access to TLER. (Seagate ERC, Samsung and Hitachi CCTL). This clearly has no impact on users using your NAS products in non-RAID mode. It also hasn't stopped hordes of users from using them in RAID mode.

At some point in the future, ALL new higher capacity drives are going to be using 4k sectors. By not supporting them, you are effectively doing an End-of Life" on your current products.

I was planning on purchasing a dozen DNS-321 for field offices in August. Based on your unfortunate decision on supporting current drive technology, D-Link is no longer being considered for any new purchasers and I am warning our employees about purchasing your products for personal use.

I'd suggest you add a warning on the packaging of your existing products immediately or it's only a matter of time before you face a class action lawsuit.

I'm always amazed when a company damages itself so badly to avoid what is frankly a trivial software change. Sad...

[dth1971]

Updating their Linux Kernel to 2.6.31 or higher would fix it.  How hard could that be?

Has anybody done a hack of these to update the OS before?

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=5655


Linux

Linux as an operating system is a combination of a kernel, user space utilities and customized packaging provided within the "distributions" such as Ubuntu, SuSE and Redhat.

The Linux kernel has had specific support for the alternate sector sizes and offsets used by WD Advanced Format disk drives since version 2.6.31. However, distributions based on Linux 2.6.34, the latest stable version of Linux, will provide the most thorough support. Advanced Format parameters are available in the sysfs file system from this kernel version onwards. Kernel versions older than 2.6.31 will not specifically detect Advanced Format Drives, but with proper alignment the system performance will be maintained. To ensure the best performance, it is important to:

Align partitions to the internal 4KB sector boundaries of the drive.
Make sure that data writes are aligned to 4KB sector boundaries.

Partitions are created by a number of possible utilities under Linux with "fdisk" and "parted" being typical command line tools. Parted is one of the better tools and from version 2.1 onwards it includes support for aligning Advanced Format drives. Fdisk and earlier versions of Parted won't automatically align partitions but can be used manually to set up the correct partition boundaries.

[softech]

I have 2 WD20EARS drives and DNS-321 is working without issue.. it recognizes it and formatted with no complaint.. am I only lucky?

(I just opened the DNS-321 last nite and that's all I did.. i didn't even copied files there yet...)

[gunrunnerjohn]

You haven't used them yet, so they haven't had to do an automatic recovery.  You'll see when you start using them in a RAID configuration.

[softech]

I did a RAID 1 configuration already.. so far so good..

What problem would I see? I am a bit worry

[gunrunnerjohn]

Typically, when it goes into the recovery cycle, one of the drives will drop out of the array and it'll be degraded.

[tristone]

it's confusing.
someone said Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS is Ok, someone said the NAS can't find the hard drive.

[peas]

Frankly your position of not supporting the new 4k sector drives makes no sense from a technical standpoint and is a poor business decision.

Western Digital, as you correctly point out, does not support RAID use of ANY of their non-Enterprise drives. As far as I know, that's also true of every other major manufacturer although WD has taken this to an extreme by eliminating access to TLER. (Seagate ERC, Samsung and Hitachi CCTL). This clearly has no impact on users using your NAS products in non-RAID mode. It also hasn't stopped hordes of users from using them in RAID mode.

At some point in the future, ALL new higher capacity drives are going to be using 4k sectors. By not supporting them, you are effectively doing an End-of Life" on your current products.

I was planning on purchasing a dozen DNS-321 for field offices in August. Based on your unfortunate decision on supporting current drive technology, D-Link is no longer being considered for any new purchasers and I am warning our employees about purchasing your products for personal use.

I'd suggest you add a warning on the packaging of your existing products immediately or it's only a matter of time before you face a class action lawsuit.

I'm always amazed when a company damages itself so badly to avoid what is frankly a trivial software change. Sad...

+1

It always seemed like the DNS-321 has been the red-headed bastard step-child in Dlink's product line.  I'll be watching this development closely to see whether I will continue to support Dlink.  My pocketbook is closing fast...

[mantolik]

I just had a WD10EADS drive go bad....in my quest to find a correct replacement, I discovered this page on WD's site -
http://support.wdc.com/product/kb.asp?groupid=608&lang=en

As you can see, the drives that end in EARS and AARS are the advance format drives....mine was a EARS unit and they are replacing it....
Hope the info helps someone else.

[fejj]

I'm using (2) WD green WD7500AADS drives in my DNS-321 in a RAID-1 configuration and have had no problem with eith the configuration of the NAS or copying over 200GB of data so far. I've checked my drives for errors and so far, so good.

According to WD, for their green drives anyway, it is the model numbers that end in 'RS' or 'RSDTL' that use their advance formatting technology. So, if you have others such as I did you may still be able to use them.

Here's the link to WD's KB on their green drives, model #'s listed in the KB doc.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1679&p_created=&p_pv=2.294&p_prods=227%2C294