Which HDD I can replace WDC WD20EARS with in the software RAID

advanced-formathard drivesoftware-raid

I have one customer's server with WDC WD20EARS drivers in a software RAID. These disks are of advanced format (4Kb sectors, not 512 bytes). They are configured as follows:

Configuration:
        Logical         max     current
        cylinders       16383   16383
        heads           16      16
        sectors/track   63      63
        --
        CHS current addressable sectors:   16514064
        LBA    user addressable sectors:  268435455
        LBA48  user addressable sectors: 3907029168
        device size with M = 1024*1024:     1907729 MBytes
        device size with M = 1000*1000:     2000398 MBytes (2000 GB)

The problem is, that one drive appeared to have bad blocks and I need to replace it. And this model is somehow out of stock here. What HDD can I replace this one with for the software RAID?

OS is CentOS Linux 5.8. RAID is mdadm.

Best Answer

Anecdotally: when I had a couple WD20EARS disks die, I sent them in for replacement and got WD20EARX disks back.

Seems that they're basically the same disk aside from the SATA3 interface on the EARX (which will work just fine with SATA2 interfaces, if that's what you have available). Here's the specs on the WD20EARS and WD20EARX - no differences aside from the interface.

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