Hi,

A few days ago my EX490 stopped responding to RDP, Connector. It has happened before so thought no big deal, pull the power and all will be well, unfortunately on this occasion it was not.

There are 2 drives, 1 the original 1TB Seagate and an additional Samsung F2 1.5TB which I added a year or 2 back.

I popped each drive in an external enclosure, the sys 20GB partition on the original drive was readable however the Data partition had turned raw. The Samsung pool drive was also readable. I used Test Disk to recover image and recover the files from the unreadable partition and backed them up to an external drive.

Once the data was recovered I formatted both the Sys and Data drive and then ran chkdsk to see if there were errors, none were reported so I performed a factory reset and left the Samsung out of the pool but connected so it was accessible. The Data partition went RAW again after a couple of days. I figure it must be a failing disk.

Now I have done some reading on about AFD disks, and there is lots of useful information for WD Drives, but to be honest its a lot of faff to get up and running.

The Seagate disks use a technology called Smart Align which is supposed to simplify the use of AFD formats on older systems.

What I would like to see is some success stories using drives with these technologies where they have been used for more than a month or two without failure as both Pool and Sys drives.

Thanks in advance

Minimos

Myself for a system drive I went with a 1TB wd black in my 490
No afd worries needed and it is a mid grade drive. So it is a step above the average consumer drive . meaning price wise.
It does get warmer that the original factory drive and is a bit louder than the stock drive.
For my pool drives they are all 2TB and are a mix wd eads and segate baracuda lp.
Again no afd special needs. Just plug and play.
The newest drive I have is around 18months old.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Are all WD Black drives non AFD? I was under the impression that all drives manufactured today used AFD.

As far as I know they still are. Of course mine is 18months old.

That last WD Black Drives I purchased this time last year were in AntiStatic Bags that were labeled as Advanced Format but when checked they were not but this does not mean this is the same case today.

My advise to anyone purchasing a new drive is to assume its Advanced Format and find out from the OEM what if anything is required to be done to the drive to ensure its compatable with the older Operating Systems and then proceed to prepare the drive for use but treat the drive as if it were to be used as a multipartioned drive so later down the road should you repurpose the drive as say a System Drive in WHS v1 the drive will be able to be used as the system disk.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8