Western Digital Raid Edition III HDDs are not recognized by the RAID Controller

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Problem Description

Western Digital Raid Edition III SATA hard drives, (with a date of purchase before December 2008), are not recognized in conjunction with the SAS expanded RAID controller. This can occur, for example on SAS/SATA RAID controllers with an integrated expander chip, (such as the Adaptec High-Port Controllers 51245, 51645, 52445), or with RAID controllers on the hard drives via the SAS expander backplane.

The hard drives are simply not recognized by the controller. If you are already successfully using such disks with a RAID controller and are not affected by the problem, no further steps are necessary.

Affected Hard Drives

This affects the following hard drives from Western Digital Raid Edition III (with a purchase date before December 2008):

  • 250GB
  • 320GB
  • 500GB

The following models are not affected:

  • 750GB
  • 1000GB

Cause

The problem is caused by the so-called Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC).[1] SSC serves to avoid Elektromagnetische Interferenzen (EMI, Funkstörungen)[2][3], but cause RAID controllers on hard drives with expander chips not to be recognized.

In the Western Digital Raid Edition III SATA, hard drives with the capacity 250GB, 320GB and 500GB SSC and a purchase date before December 2008 are enabled.

Solution

SSC can not be disabled by a Jumper, (as is available with some other disk drives), on these hard drives. SSC can be deactivated with the WDSSC.EXE tool (in DOS). For this, the hard drives must be connected to the onboard SATA controller on the motherboard.

Enter the following command in DOS Prompt.

 WDSSC.exe -d 

The tool finds all hard drives that are connected to the onboard SATA controller and turns it off from the SSC.

The tool can be downloaded here: File:WDSSC 1 01.zip

References

  1. Spread Spectrum Clocking (de.wikipedia.org)
  2. Electromagnetic Interference (en.wikipedia.org)
  3. Funkstörung (de.wikipedia.org)

Additional Information

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