[OpenIndiana-discuss] [zfs-discuss] Question about WD drives with Super Micro systems

[Mark]

On 07/08/2011 10:40 p.m., Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
>> The other overlooked thing is the different topology ie. native sata
>> against sas translated sata and then sas expander as well.
>>
>> I have had seagate ST3000641's just refuse to run with expanders, but
>> work diecty connected to the sas controller.
>>
>> It's funny how all this reminds me of fibre channel behaviour in it's
>> early days.
>
> Then why do Hitachi and Seagate drives work flawlessly for me? We have some slow Seagate drives (ST32000542AS) in two chassises, and those just work. Another server, using Hitachi HDS721010CLA332 drives also just works - one dead drive during burn-in, and that was all. Western drives on direct attach works, but with SAS expanders, we get I/O errors (as reported by zpool and iostat) on high load.
>

My conclusion is that WD don't really want desktop drives to work on 
anything but a direct sata connection port.

The WD desktop disk's firmware appears to be designed to fail on 
hardware raid and sas.
I've tested a range of them and found that early versions of drives 
worked well, but firmware changes/updates to later versions of the same 
disk now fail, usually under load.

I suppose for WD, there had to be a defining boundary between Desktop 
and Enterprise, and Hardware Raid and Expanders are firmly pushed to the 
enterprise side.

Mark.