Western Digital Black 1TB WD1001FALS does not show on boot

[spiff]

We go through a lot of hard drives where I work and recently we have run into a major issue with one Western Digital 1TB Black series hard drive.

Specifically the WD1001FALS

The issue was this, if we did a cold boot on our system with the WD1001FALS installed, the drive would not show up in the BIOS.

Now if we left the system on and simply reset the system, the drive would appear in the BIOS and work perfectly.

Now the fix for this issue was to disable quick boot in the BIOS and that seemed to give the drive enough time to initialize and the BIOS would see the drive every time.

Basically you just need to slow down your boot sequence so the drive can initialize before the BIOS tries to read from them, enabling AHCI mode or RAID mode seemed to fix this issue as well.

This issue only seems to be showing up on newer versions of the WD1001FALS.

After working with Western Digital on this issue here was their response.

It has been determined that the WD1001FALS drives you are using are operating within specification. The reason you are seeing this issue is that the previous model hard drive you had did not have the PSD (Power Safe Download) feature built in, and the newer model does have this as part of the drive. If you continue to use this model hard drive, and are getting the newer model drives, you would need to disable the Quick boot feature as you are doing now for your work around.

So it seems the addition of this feature is what is causing this issue, as usual they deny that this is a problem.

So my question to the rest of the forum is have any of you seen this problem on this drive or any other recent Western Digital drives?

Edited March 24, 2010 by spiff