Hi. I have a basic whitebox host running ESXI 4.1. I have 3 SATA disks on my system board's controller and am trying to add an additional one, a WD20EARS (WD 2TB green, advanced format (4k) drive), which I cannot for the life of me get working.

I've been trying to add the disk as a new datastore through the Vsphere client, but to no avail. It errors out on me at each step of the wizard, and while I can muddle through by repeating the previous step, I cannot create the datastore.

Are advanced format drives not supported? Is there a work around?

Thanks,
S

WD has a link to a utility on their site that you can use to realign those drives to 512bytes rather than 4k. http://support.wdc.com/product/downloadsw.asp?sid=128 (NOTE: Have to use it in Windows. I put my drives into an external USB enclosure, and it was able to realign them fine through it.)

Also, you might want to check into using WDIDLE to turn off the parking timeout on those drives. They have a ridiculous value set in them by default that causes the drive to park the heads after something silly like 8 seconds. I can't remember the exact value, but believe me, it's ridiculously small, IMHO.

The drives themselves will start to give SMART errors after a certain number of head parks, as they're rated to only support a certain number before they expect you to start having issues with the drive. Due to the low timeout value, this limit gets hit in a matter of months on a system that's used frequently, as opposed to it taking years to get to it.

Lastly, check into running WDTLER as well, to change the Time Limit Error Recovery value (default is 7 seconds). ESPECIALLY if you plan on using those drives in a RAID set.