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Western Digital My Book Duo 4TB on Dell XPS 8700 fails after several hours; multiple replacement drives do the same

tcianflone
tcianflone asked
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This started with a simple recommendation to put the business client's data on an external RAID drive to provide some redundancy seeing they are not using a real server. Then it turned into a nightmare. I've swapped the drive out twice since with the same results. After installing the drive and testing it, it will run for several hours, maybe overnight. Then writes start failing (see system error log attached). In the WD utility, it doesn't even see the drive. The utility starts and shows the message no supported drives found. I can still browse the drive, but cannot do any write operations. Power cycling the drive brings it back and the cycle starts again.

I have tried running the drive in both RAID 0 (mirror) and RAID 1 (stripped) modes with the same result. The drive will do JBOD, but I haven't tried that yet. The BIOS of the host Dell XPS 8700 is at the latest release level. OS is Windows 8.1. The only thing unusual about the Dell host is that, in addition to the SATA boot drive, it also has a solid state Samsung drive they use as a data drive to host a business database.

Western Digital support has been useless for this problem. All they know how to do is replace the drive.
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Seth SimmonsSr. Systems Administrator

Commented:
how are you connecting the drive?
have you tried a different port (usb)?
Commented:
Looks like I'm not the only one. Here is another user with a Dell XPS 8700 experiencing the same problem: http://www.amazon.com/review/RMKNQVXMNRZ3/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#RMKNQVXMNRZ3

And, yes, I did the same firmware update and got the same results: no fix.
tcianflone

Author

Commented:
Drive is connected via USB. Multiple USB ports tried with same results.
Seth SimmonsSr. Systems Administrator

Commented:
do you have another system to test with?
tcianflone

Author

Commented:
I suppose I could pick up the drive and run it in my lab. What I did do was to put one of my external usb drives on the client's PC and that ran for days without problems. It was also a WD USB 3.0 drive, but not raid capable. I wanted to see if any USB drive would run there, and indeed it does without problems.
rindi
Most Valuable Expert 2015

Commented:
"RAID 0 (mirror) and RAID 1 (stripped)"

Your mistaken with both. RAID 0 isn't a mirror but rather 2 or more disks striped without redundancy, if one disk fails you loose all data. RAID 1 is the mirror and does have redundancy.

Make sure you use either enterprise class disks, or at list disks that are specially built for NAS usage. Whatever you do, don't use normal consumer disks, as those aren't built for RAID.

As far as I know the WD "Red" disks are built for NAS usage.
tcianflone

Author

Commented:
Yeah, OK, I get those reversed sometimes. As for disks, I'm using the disks that WD shipped with their product. Doesn't change the problem. In any case, once I found that review on Amazon showing the exact same problem on the exact same host PC, a Dell XPS 8700, I decided that this is a WD problem and I'm done with it.
rindi
Most Valuable Expert 2015

Commented:
As mentioned, you need at least disks that were built for NAS use. Maybe you got consumer disks shipped with the product.

Also check the NAS's firmware. There may be updates available.
tcianflone

Author

Commented:
This is clearly a manufacturer problem as shown in the link I posted. Unfortunately, I only found that link after posting the question here. I'd like the question to be on file for others having the same issue with the WD product on Dell XPS 8700s.