Are certain WD drives not compatible with Drobo???

Forum History General Discussion
1

According to the WD forums, the EARS WD drives are not RAID compatible. This from the WD forum Community Manager:

Our only Green drives that are RAID compatible are Models: WD2002FYPS, WD1000FYPS, WD7500AYPS, and WD5000ABPS. None of the Caviar Green drives, including the EARS drives are RAID compatible. That’s why they will continue to fall out of the RAID arrays.

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Other-Internal-Drives/1-TB-WD10EARS-desynch-issues-in-RAID/m-p/11559

In Fact I’ve had three 2TB WD hard drives go bad on me in the last 6 months in my Drobo.

2

we seem to cover this topic about once a month in this forum… have a quick search…

short version: thats crap and they are trying to sell you more expensive drives

drobo is specifically designed to work with desktop class drives and doesn’t count as a classic style “RAID” controller

they only fall out of certain types of raid arrays because they dont have TLER enabled, thats the ONLY difference, and drobo doenst care about TLER

3

Well, I don’t think anybody categorically established that. Data Robotics answers on that subject were always ambiguous. Understanding what TLER does, I don’t see how Drobo could be immune to too long retries, and the lack of TLER is a good candidate for those drives “bad for Drobo” but checking OK with the manufacturer utility.

But I agree with your overall conclusion, the added cost of “Entreprise” drives is not worth it.

4

None are incompatible (as long as they have the right interface), though there are some that aren’t necessarily recommended, in particular…

[list]
[]AV drives - AV drives sacrifice data integrity for speed, since the assumption is that an AV glitch will show up only in a short period of time, and AV drives are often tasked with simultaneous multi-stream read/write
[]RE - Drobo doesn’t need (and can’t reach) this level of performance - not yet at least
[*]Black - the lower Drobos can’t reach this level of performance, and the added heat can do bad things like cause Drobo to continuously run its fan at high speed
[/list]