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[motopsycho]

I have always purchased WD drives but is it the best option for the 323?

Is the WD20EADS compatible?  I want to go as big as I can go.   

[gunrunnerjohn]

Look for drives WITHOUT the new 4k sector option, you'll be happy you did.

[tentimes]

I have always purchased WD drives but is it the best option for the 323?

Is the WD20EADS compatible?  I want to go as big as I can go.   

The EADS are fine, they are not 4k sector I believe - double check on the WD website though. For the 4k sector drives if you are not using them in RAID and just using standalone then I strongly suspect there will be a BIOS fix, but in the meantime I have posted a fix (which won't be too hard to code in firmware): http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=14484.0

In terms of RAID though, WD have really ****ed that one up rayally by disabling the TLER bit. I think this is a terrible strategy, but until they reverse the decision I defintely would not touch these for RAID. Don't confuse the 4k sector problem with the RAID issue though - 4k sectors is here to stay and I am sure the other manufacturers will be releasing 4k sector drives very soon. Hopefully we will get normal ones though that don't report 512k sectors instead of 4k. Maybe have jumper for that for windows xp users.

[jamieburchell]

They want you to buy the enterprise drives for RAID instead of desktop drives...They specifically mention the proper TLER setting and AFAIK give a MTBF rating that they don't do for desktop drives. This is also true for Seagate.

I thought the 4K sector drives already had jumpers for Windows XP.

[scaramanga]

Before I bought the HDDs I looked into this TLER thing. Since I eventually decided to use standard mode, TLER became a non-issue. However, I came across this:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-features/31202-should-you-use-tler-drives-in-your-raid-nas
The relevant part from this article is:

The responses I received from Synology, QNAP, NETGEAR and Buffalo all indicated that their NAS RAID controllers don't depend on or even listen to TLER, CCTL, ERC or any other similar error recovery signal from their drives. Instead, their software RAID controllers have their own criteria for drive timeouts, retries and when a drive is finally marked bad.

These software RAID controllers are generally more patient and wait significantly longer for drive response and execute more retries before finally giving up and marking a drive dead. While this may degrade performance slightly when dealing with drives with bad blocks, it's intended to reduce the occurrances of drives dropping out of RAID volumes and the subsequent long, risky rebuilds.

Too bad they didn't get word from D-Link about this. I was too lazy to read through the code and find out for myself. If this convinces you or not - that's up to you.

p.s.: Also note that the TLER feature exists/doesn't-exist in other vendor's HDDs as well. Different vendors use different names for it.

An informed official response to this article from D-Link will be appreciated, I think.

[tentimes]

If that's the case (and I don't know much about raid) then since we now have a solution for the 4k sector issue then I don't see why there isn't an easy firmware update for it. Certainly the method I posted for formatting the 4k sectors on boundaries properly is extremely easy to put into the firmware - it a matter of changing 3 lines tops (Using Fdisk -H 224 -S 56 to partition instead of whatever other Fdisk command they have insures it's on 4k boundaries).

The more I look into this and understand it, the more I come to the opinion that Dlink have a really poor firmware development lab. For the past 2 years on the DIR-655 we have had one firmware debacle after another. I have a suspicion that they outsource firmware development and don't understand their own firmware. I mean, I didn't have a clue how the thing worked apart from it was a box with 2 drives in it and some flashing blue lights, and within 8 hours I was able to update my machine to get over the 4k sector problem.

Just looking through some of the code, if people like Wilson Chan have moved on then I suppose it wouldn't be the easiest job in the world to go back in and edit it But I suspect with even my limited knowledge that after updating fdisk bin and commands it probably a matter of a kernel update? I dunno.

Time we had some more info from Dlink though!

[scaramanga]

It's been almost two weeks now, and still no official response from D-Link regarding what I wrote/quoted a couple of replies above.
The sticky welcome thread says:

This forum is designed to allow the public and the Technical Services department of D-Link to openly share ideas and quick fix tips. Please keep posts concise and on topic.

So D-Link, please share your thoughts with us on this matter.

[papasmurph]

I use WD20EADS with 1.09 firmware. I haven't set the drives for XP mode.

So far the only issues I have noted are (which might be generic to the DNS-323 rather than the drives):
* Copying many small files take forever. There seems to be extensive latency between files. Due to Samba?
* Sometimes there's something "lost in the translation" so that Windows 7 thinks it can't copy a large file. I have to restart the copy, and if the file is large enough (like 10 GB) it sometimes never will copy.

Cheers

[gunrunnerjohn]

Neither of those issues happen with either my DNS-321 or DNS-323 for small files or large files.  I have 40gb backup image files and tons of little files, no issues at all.

[jamieburchell]

Sometimes there's something "lost in the translation" so that Windows 7 thinks it can't copy a large file. I have to restart the copy, and if the file is large enough (like 10 GB) it sometimes never will copy.

Cheers

Are you connecting wirelessly? That happens to me when copying large files over wireless. The connection kind of dies at random. No fault of the 323.

[irotjaf]

Hi Jamie,

Is it normal that the wifi connection dies? I stream movies to my laptop and occasionally VLC stop reading the file with an error message and freezes. Can this be due to what you say?

I am planning to buy a TV with wifi remote capability (or a device to read media in wireless from the NAS) but if the wifi connection is going to die at random... I should rethink my plans.

Thank you.

[wilburyan]

I use WD20EADS with 1.09 firmware. I haven't set the drives for XP mode.

So far the only issues I have noted are (which might be generic to the DNS-323 rather than the drives):
* Copying many small files take forever. There seems to be extensive latency between files. Due to Samba?
* Sometimes there's something "lost in the translation" so that Windows 7 thinks it can't copy a large file. I have to restart the copy, and if the file is large enough (like 10 GB) it sometimes never will copy.

Cheers

EADS drives are not 4k... so your comment has nothing to do with this thread.

[jamieburchell]

Hi Jamie,

Is it normal that the wifi connection dies? I stream movies to my laptop and occasionally VLC stop reading the file with an error message and freezes. Can this be due to what you say?

I am planning to buy a TV with wifi remote capability (or a device to read media in wireless from the NAS) but if the wifi connection is going to die at random... I should rethink my plans.

Thank you.

I have no idea what causes it, but if I'm copying large files around on my laptops it sometimes happens. I usually get a "location is unavailable" or "semaphore timeout has expired" - whatever that means. It seems to disrupt the wireless connection for several seconds before I try again. Interestingly, it never happens when streaming 4-8GB ISO files through my Buffalo Nfiniti Wireless N Ethernet converter on the same network, same speed and SMB protocol. Go figure!

[dosborne]

In any case, it has nothing to do with the topic of this thread.

[lobotiger]

Hey everyone.  I'm thinking of swapping my 2TB Western Digital Green (EADS) drive with 2x1TB Western Digital Blue drives (WD10EALS) and run them in RAID0.  I haven't seen any evidence of them working or not working in this setup but thought I'd check in here first.  My main beef is that the Green drive just seems a little too sluggish when transferring files back and forth at least compared to when I have a pair of 500GB Seagate drives in there in RAID1.  If the Blue drives work, do you think I'll see any kind of performance improvement?

Thanks.

LoboTiger