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

[David Brodbeck]

On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 3:40 AM, Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk <roy at karlsbakk.net>wrote:

> 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.
>

The phrase "slow" makes me wonder if this is a speed mismatch.

I have some Western Digital SATA drives (RE and RE2 series) on 3ware
9500-series RAID 5 controllers.  These are SATA2 (300 MB/s) drives, but the
controllers are 150 MB/s only.  If I don't set the jumpers on the drives to
limit them to 150 MB/s, they get kicked out under heavy load.  The jumper
for this is usually labeled OPT1.  I don't know if it's supported on all
newer drives or not.  Here's an image from Western Digital explaining the
jumper options:
http://support.wdc.com/images/kb/sata.gif


-- 
David Brodbeck
System Administrator, Linguistics
University of Washington