ReadyNAS 316 - Disc 5 impending failure warning - leading to question about WD white label drives

Question

A couple of days ago, my RN316 emailed an impending failure warning for disc no 5 in my raid array. Luckily I do have a couple of spare 12TB drives laying around, specifically for the dreaded day when a drive does finally fail.

I am currently backing up the NAS to my secondary NAS (I have a primary NAS that is used 24/7 and the secondary NAS is only powered up periodically when I need to take a backup).

The drives currently installed in the primary NAS are WD Red 12TB WD120EFAX drives that spin at 5400rpm. The only WD Red's that I can see now on Amazon UK are 7200rpm and all are out of stock. I know there can be an issue if you mix 5400rpm and 7200rpm drives in a raid volume. I had an issued on my other third NAS when I upgraded the discs in it and the NAS wasn't happy about the rpm differential and kept sending warnings all the time the raid volume was being rebuilt.

As I still want to have at least 2 spare drives available for all my NAS devices, I was considering swapping two 5400 rpm drives in a 2 disk raid 1 volume in my third NAS for 7200rpm drives, then using those two 5400rpm drives as future spares. This leads me to my question, which I hope someone knowledgeable on here will have an answer to.

Because Amazon UK does not have any WD Red 12TB drives in stock and all the other suppliers I would usually use are extremely expensive (This is a personal NAS, not business), I was wondering about shucking a WD 24TB My Book duo. I know these now have WD white label drives in them and I know that they won't be on the Netgear ReadyNAS compatibility list (and frankly, as Netgear no longer make ReadyNAS devices, I am not bothered about maintaining compliance with the compatibility list). So my question is, does anyone know if WD white label drives have the third pin 3.3v issue when used with ReadyNAS devices? If someone has shucked a WD My Book duo recently could detail their experience when installing a white label drive in a ReadyNAS, it would be appreciated.

Thank you

Sandshark · Answer

While the NAS will complain about it, mixing drive speeds has caused me no issues with my 12-bay rack-mount ReadyNAS's and I have seen no reported issues here that seem to have been caused by a speed mismatch. The big thing you need to avoid is any SMR drives. I'm not aware of any 12TB drives that are SMR, but you never know for sure what's in a USB drive until you open it. Be very careful, too, that you don't end up with one that has the USB circuit built into the drive electronics instead of having a USB to SATA board. I've heard some now have that.

Personally, I wouldn't go with a shucked drive. Having had a couple drives fail prematurely that were covered by warranty, I would not risk voiding the warranty for a few dollars (Pounds, Euro, whatever).

What you actually want to get a speed match is the Red Plus (WD120EFBX), not a red. The 12TB Red was discontinued when they introduced the Red Plus to differentiate the CMR drives from the SMR Reds. Well, discontinued may be the wrong word, I think they may have simply been re-labeled.

StephenB · Answer

amrob2&nbsp;wrote:Thing is, I have never bought Seagate drives before and I know there was a period when they had a very poor reputation for failure rates. Does anyone know if they still have that poor reputation, or are they as reliable as Western Digital now?
&nbsp;

I had a bad experience with Seagates a long time ago (mostly "DM" models), and switched to WDC Reds at that point.
&nbsp;
However, more recently I have mixed in some Ironwolf drives, and so far have had no issues with them.&nbsp; I have one Exos which is working well, but when I tried to get a second one, it failed out-of-the-box.&nbsp; The exchange failed the same way, so I got a refund and purchased something else.&nbsp; But the Seagates haven't been in place long enough for me to assess their long-term reliability.
&nbsp;
FWIW, my current strategy is to look at pricing for both the WD Red plus and the Seagate Ironwolf, and purchase whatever is cheapest.&nbsp; I test the new drives in a Windows PC before adding them to the NAS - running both the full non-destructive read test, and a full erase test.&nbsp; I have had some drives that fail one of these tests, but pass the other.
&nbsp;
Getting accurate info on drive reliability isn't easy -&nbsp; everyone has an anecdotal opinion based on their experience with a small sample size (including me).&nbsp; Backblaze does provide good stats on the drives that they use, but their servers are very different from desktop NAS, so the environment is really not comparable.&nbsp; Setting that aside, their stats aren't that great for Exos.&nbsp; But unfortunately, they don't have any Ironwolf drives in their mix.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2022/

amrob2&nbsp;wrote:

Going back to shucked drives for a moment, I know that the discs in the "WD My Book Duo's" are standard hard drives with nothing soldered on the connectors as the My Book Duo's have standard SATA connectors in them and are designed for the user to pull a disc if need be (So you can upgrade the discs in them in the future if you wish). It's just that they now use white label drives instead of WD Red's and the white label ones sometimes have a third pin 3.3v issue which can make them not compatible with some computers/servers unless you cover the third pin. All my existing 12TB WD Reds were shucked from My Book Duo's several years ago (And it saved me well of £1200 buying them that way).

My impression is the experience of other users here with shucked drives is a bit mixed.
&nbsp;
Consumers getting USB drives are particularly sensitive to price, and it's hard to know exactly what the white-label drive specs are.&nbsp; SMR drives are particularly problematic for NAS, so IMO it is important to avoid them.
&nbsp;
Personally I haven't shucked any - in large part because I value the warranty.&nbsp; Though if I were in the UK or EU I might have gone that route, as I think drives can be quite a bit more expensive there.

Sandshark · Answer

No ReadyNAS desktop unit has an issue with the pin 3 power disable (which is not unique to shucked drives, it's a change in the SATA spec) because they have no 3.3V in the SATA backplane.&nbsp; Pin 3 is a no-connect.&nbsp; I simply don't know about rack-mount units, but that doesn't affect you.&nbsp;I purchased a NAS that contained 5 WD Gold drives, and 3 of the 5 failed just after the 5-year warranty expired.&nbsp; The 6th drive in it was a Red (from when they were CMR) with much lower hours, but I don't know if it was added later or was a replacement for a 6th Gold that failed before I purchased it.&nbsp; The SMART on them showed they'd remained on most of their life (few recorded power cycles), but I do not know how they were treated otherwise.&nbsp; And I bought two new WD Red (again, when they were still CMR) that both arrived with bad sectors, so they are not always better.&nbsp; &nbsp;I'm partial to the HGST line that now belongs to WD, and many of the larger WD drives, including those in USB units, are from that line.

StephenB · Answer

Sandshark&nbsp;wrote:
&nbsp;
I purchased a NAS that contained 5 WD Gold drives, and 3 of the 5 failed just after the 5-year warranty expired.&nbsp; The 6th drive in it was a Red (from when they were CMR) with much lower hours, but I don't know if it was added later or was a replacement for a 6th Gold that failed before I purchased it.&nbsp; The SMART on them showed they'd remained on most of their life (few recorded power cycles), but I do not know how they were treated otherwise.&nbsp; And I bought two new WD Red (again, when they were still CMR) that both arrived with bad sectors, so they are not always better.&nbsp; &nbsp;I'm partial to the HGST line that now belongs to WD, and many of the larger WD drives, including those in USB units, are from that line.

Kind of my point - end users have experience with a small number of drives, generally not enough to have statistically significant data.&nbsp; Our personal experience tends to drive our individual preferences.&nbsp;&nbsp;
&nbsp;
Here's some of mine:
&nbsp;
My Duo has a Seagate&nbsp;ST32000542AS that I put into service in 2010.&nbsp; My later experience with Seagate Barracudas shifted me away from them for a while, but that particular drive has never had any issues.
&nbsp;
My NV+ is still running the original WD20EARS drives I installed in 2011.&nbsp; I put WD30EFRX drives in my Pro-6 about 10 years ago, and some of those drives are still in service. A couple failed (really don't recall how many), but others were just replaced with larger models to get more capacity.
&nbsp;
Along the way I got a few failures with WD60EFRX models which for some reason didn't show up in the SMART stats, so I took the remaining ones out of service - because I didn't think I could trust them.&nbsp; I haven't had any issues with the 8-14 TB WD Red Plus drives I have in service now, or the Ironwolf drives that I added into the mix. Some of those are helium-filled, so I think came from the HGST line.
&nbsp;
I have had several drives fail my disk tests out-of-the-box (both WD and Seagate) - no way to tell if they were due to manufacturing defects or bad handling/damage during shipping.

StephenB · Answer

amrob2&nbsp;wrote:
&nbsp;
The drives currently installed in the primary NAS are WD Red 12TB WD120EFAX drives that spin at 5400rpm.

Actually they spin at 7200 (even though for some reason WDC had them advertise themselves as 5400 class).

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/317327-western-digital-changes-its-reported-drive-speeds-to-reflect-reality

But you can mix-and-match, as&nbsp;Sandshark&nbsp;says.

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ReadyNAS 316 - Disc 5 impending failure warning - leading to question about WD white label drives

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