Hello,

I have a MediaSmart EX490 with 12 total drives. I've successfully used several WD EARS drives with the pins 7-8 jumper in my setup. I went to the local computer store yesterday and bought 2 more green drives, but all they had were EARX drives (SATA 6Gb). To my dismay when I went to install them the pin 7-8 jumper trick doesn't work. So I added the drives to my storage pool, then tried to use WD's Align utility (which installed onto my WHS just fine). After it was done DE said my disks were not added.

Any ideas on how I can fix this? Soon the only thing available will be drives that don't have the jumper option.

Thanks!

Drive Extender does some pretty interesting "tricks" that unfortunately are not as simple as just creating a partition and NTFS mount point. While it does these things, it also creates some Registry entries that store additional information such as the partition offset (how many bytes from zero where the partition starts--proper alignment on an AFD must be evenly divisible by 4096). It also stores the size of the partition, in bytes.

So if you used the WD Align utility, it effectively "moved" the partition on the disk, thereby changing the offset. Changing the offset probably changed the partition size as well, even if only by a few hundred bytes.

Long story short...what exists on the disk and what exists in the Registry doesn't match, and so as far as DE is concerned, the disk is not present, even though it really is.

My recommendation would be to go through this post (http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2011/02 ... mat-drive/) and see if you can, through the use of the WMI commands, make heads or tails of what's going on. The process there requires that you determine what the partition sizes and offsets are before realigning a partition. This is because you need to go and manually make Registry edits, and tweak very exact settings. Since you've already realigned the partitions, the original offset and size is now an unknown variable, although you may be able to make an educated guess by finding the appropriate NTFS mount point in the Registry. The documented process tells you exactly which commands to run and which values to put where, so you can try to go through the steps and see if you can piece it back together.

The only other option would be to treat the situation as a drive failure. In this case, you remove the drives from the pool--after all, DE thinks they're AWOL anyway. If you performed the realignment immediately after joining those disks to the pool, then the likelihood of data loss is fairly small, since DE probably didn't have a chance to start putting data on those disks. If the disks baked in the server for a few days before you realigned them, then you'll definitely lose data so you'd probably want to try piecing things back together first (make a backup of those disk's contents first!).

Matt

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Matt Sawyer
Owner, Dojo North Software, LLC

HP EX490, 4GB, E5300, 15TB - Server 2012 - Sharing and Streaming
HP EX487, 4GB, E5300, 13TB - Server 2012 Essentials - Backups

Thanks for the info. I added the two drives to the pool and then less than a minute later I aligned them (time it takes me to walk from my basement to my desk upstairs). I'll try removing them from the pool and following the procedure you linked.

As an big fan of the MSS and WHS I have to say I'm really disappointed by WD's decision to remove the 7-8 pin jumper setting. I have only used WD drives for the last 12 years, and I've had nothing but good luck with them until this incident. Now I'm going to start looking at other manufacturer's 2TB drives and try to find one more compatible than the new WD drives for my future storage expansion. Anybody have any suggestions?

So using that link I was able to correctly align the drives and everything is happy now in my WHS. My question is if all of WD's new drives are NOT going to have the pins 7-8 jumper, and the old ones are already disappearing from store shelves ... then what's the best 2TB drive to buy for a WHS v1 box?

Personally I would not worry about AF Drive just make certain you are familiar with how its suppose to be prepared as recommended by the OEM. With Western Digital they have thier Alignment Utility and the drives which allowed you to jumper them were only good for single partion if the jumper was installed but if you wanted to use them for a System Drive you would need to Align them for multipartion use. So for WD Drives when in doubt just align them and be done with it.

My understanding with Seagate AF drives is they are plug and play but if I were to use those drives I would still check with Seagate to confirm how to properly set them up for legacy OS use.

I would simply recommend you find a hard drive manufacture your comfortable with and learn about how to properly prepare those drives for use with your server and this will make your experience a good one. I only purchase Hitachi Deskstar (Now part of WD) and WD Black Drives for my servers. Others have thier prefrences for drives some use only Seagate others Samsung and others just purchase whats onsale at the time they need new drives. There is no right or wrong here just a personal prefrence.

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Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

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