I’ve had a Western Digital WD DX 4000 8TB model for quite a few years now, and it’s doing great duty storing offsite backups from my home here in my office. However this week I had one of the 2TB drives fail with clicking and grinding. No issues, the WD is in RAID5 therefore my data is protected. The challenge however is that WD only tested specific drives with the Sentinel and had a whitelist of drives that it would officially support. You can’t buy those drives now. Now there were various hacks on the Internet talking about how to modify the Whitelist.xml file to permit it to support current drives. In all of this I stumbled across one very simple fact. Western Digital last year realised that having us hack files to continue to use these units was not a good idea. They released a utility called the Drive Enabler utility which can be installed on the WD DX 4000 units and this permits us to use pretty much any drive we want. After you install the utility, it adds an entry to the Dashboards Compatible Hard Drive list as you can see below and you can now replace the failed drive with anything.
For my part, I chose to replace the failed 2TB drive with another WD Red Pro 2TB drive and it’s rebuilt overnight and my RAID is once again healthy!
You can download the utility here
Thanks for helping me with same issues on my DX4000. You’re a champ.
Thanks for this and credit where it’s due for WD on this one. I wasn’t a big fan of the (incredible) strictness of their drive compatibility to begin with, but this is a great move.
For the cost of a refurbished ‘compatible’ drive today (late 2020) I could buy four new 2TB Red drives and fail them all one and a time for a bit more peace of mind if I wanted to.
Really glad I found this post. Top work!