[OpenIndiana-discuss] BAD WD drives - defective by design?

[Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk]

Hi all

It seems recent WD drives that aren't "Raid edition" can cause rather a lot of problems on RAID systems. We have a few machines with LSI controllers (6801/6081/9201) and we're seeing massive errors occuring. The usual pattern is a drive failing or even a resilver/scrub starting and then, suddenly, most drives on the whole backplane report errors. These are usually No Device (as reported by iostat -En), but the result is that we may see data corruption at the end. We also have a system setup with Hitachi Deskstars, which has been running for almost a year without issues. One system with a mixture of WD Blacks and greens showed the same errors as described, but has been working well after the WD drives were replaced by deskstars.

Now, it seems WD has changed their firmware to inhibit people from using them for other things than toys (read: PCs etc). Since we've seen this issue on different controllers and different drives, and can't reproduce it with Hitachi Deskstars, I would guess the firmware "upgrade" from WD is the issue.

Would it be possible to fix this in ZFS somehow? The drives seem to work well except for those "No Device" errors....

Vennlige hilsener / Best regards

roy
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Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk
(+47) 97542685
roy at karlsbakk.net
http://blogg.karlsbakk.net/
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