RAID 1 Mirror Error with Two Western Digital 500GB Drives

Question

I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit installed on a Western Digital 500GB drive (WD5000BEVT-22ZAT0) that was partitioned automatically by Windows as 100MB System Reserved and 465.66GB drive C.

There is also an unallocated second Western Digital 500GB drive (WD5000BPVT-22HXZT1) that I want to use for RAID 1 to mirror the first drive but I get an error message stating

“ALL DISKS HOLDING EXTENTS FOR A GIVEN VOLUME MUST HAVE THE SAME SECTOR SIZE, AND THE SECTOR SIZE MUST BE VALID.”

I uninstalled Windows patch KB-982018 but I still get the same error message. Could you please let me know how to resolve this?

Answer 1

The problem is that fsutil does not really report everything as some "helpers" and KB articles tell you. I just had that case: Combining a WD-RED 3 TB with an Seagate Barracuda XT 3 TB.

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo <drive_letter> showed both as identical 512 bytes per sector. The Sysinternals ntfsinfo does the same. But then I used smartctl.exe -a /dev/sda from smartmontools (get it from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/files/smartmontools/ ). And THAT one finally showed the real reason, which Windows does not show...

For the WD-RED WD30EFRX-68AX9N0, smartctl -a /dev/sda says:

Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical

For the Seagate ST33000651AS, smartctl -a /dev/sdb says:

Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 512 bytes physical

So for everyone having that problem and not knowing why Windows refuses to mirror even if fsutil confirms the same "sector size", use smartctl to see the REAL stuff.

Answer 2

It looks like you are having trouble with Advanced Format.

The WD5000BPT uses advanced format, while your current drive, WD5000BEVT, does not. Advanced format simply means that the sector size of these newer drives are now 4k bits instead of 512 bits. This allows drive manufacturers to build larger, cheaper drives. More info.

Western Digital has an alignment tool that can be found here. It may help your issue.

Answer 3

Cameron did give you excellent info on the topic. Using the alignment tool should enable you to freely use both drives. A couple of notes from me: - Having two different drives in a RAID array potentially increases the chances that a drive would drop out of the array due to differences in the firmware, speed, etc. I'd try to have as similar drives as possible for the most stable RAID array and better data safety. - WD Blue isn't really recommended for RAID usage as it does not have the required features such as TLER for safer and more stable performance in RAID environments. I'd try to stick to NAS/RAID class drives for better safety and stability (WD Red is a good example).

Post back if you need more info!

Captain_WD.

Answer 4

I encountered this error and this is how I solved it:

I wanted to add a mirror (raid 1) to a HP ML310e Gen8 v2 that ran Windows Server 2012 r2. The server had been used and ran good for several years but I wanted to add more security even though the server was backed up to other media, both over Internet and locally.

Keeping the data and the operating system intact was essential. Adding a mirror can in some scenarios minimize downtime in case of a disk failiure.

I had many different disks of the same size laying around that I tried. I found that none would work. I had already updated every driver, software and service pack/release I could find. I still got the same error as above in this thread.

Solution: I diskcopied the original harddisk to one of the disks I already had in an external USB enclosure (did not plug it in, used the ”one button” copy function.).

After I had plugged in the ”new” disk and one of my other disks (not the servers original one) all went smooth and there was no problem adding a mirror in Windows Disk Management Console anymore.

I got so happy I decided to register and post this comment!