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Forum Discussion
ReadyNAS 316 - Disc 5 impending failure warning - leading to question about WD white label drives
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 whe...
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.
Sandshark wrote: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.
I have looked for the WD120EFBX, but Amazon UK does not have it in stock (They have hardly anything in stock and I will not buy from 'market place' sellers as quite often you end up with something that doesn't work or isn't as described with the UK sellers).
I am now considering buying a couple of Seagate 12TB drives to put into a different server (rebuilding a "raid 1" 2 disk volume on that server) and pulling the existing WD reds from that server and keeping them as spares for this server - just so that I keep all disks the same on this main server. 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?
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).
amrob2 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?I had a bad experience with Seagates a long time ago (mostly "DM" models), and switched to WDC Reds at that point.
However, more recently I have mixed in some Ironwolf drives, and so far have had no issues with them. I have one Exos which is working well, but when I tried to get a second one, it failed out-of-the-box. The exchange failed the same way, so I got a refund and purchased something else. But the Seagates haven't been in place long enough for me to assess their long-term reliability.
FWIW, my current strategy is to look at pricing for both the WD Red plus and the Seagate Ironwolf, and purchase whatever is cheapest. 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. I have had some drives that fail one of these tests, but pass the other.
Getting accurate info on drive reliability isn't easy - everyone has an anecdotal opinion based on their experience with a small sample size (including me). 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. Setting that aside, their stats aren't that great for Exos. But unfortunately, they don't have any Ironwolf drives in their mix.
amrob2 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.
Consumers getting USB drives are particularly sensitive to price, and it's hard to know exactly what the white-label drive specs are. SMR drives are particularly problematic for NAS, so IMO it is important to avoid them.
Personally I haven't shucked any - in large part because I value the warranty. 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.
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. Pin 3 is a no-connect. I simply don't know about rack-mount units, but that doesn't affect you.
I purchased a NAS that contained 5 WD Gold drives, and 3 of the 5 failed just after the 5-year warranty expired. 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. 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. 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. 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.
Sandshark wrote:
I purchased a NAS that contained 5 WD Gold drives, and 3 of the 5 failed just after the 5-year warranty expired. 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. 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. 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. 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. Our personal experience tends to drive our individual preferences.
Here's some of mine:
My Duo has a Seagate ST32000542AS that I put into service in 2010. My later experience with Seagate Barracudas shifted me away from them for a while, but that particular drive has never had any issues.
My NV+ is still running the original WD20EARS drives I installed in 2011. 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.
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. 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.
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 wrote:
amrob2 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?I had a bad experience with Seagates a long time ago (mostly "DM" models), and switched to WDC Reds at that point.
However, more recently I have mixed in some Ironwolf drives, and so far have had no issues with them. I have one Exos which is working well, but when I tried to get a second one, it failed out-of-the-box. The exchange failed the same way, so I got a refund and purchased something else. But the Seagates haven't been in place long enough for me to assess their long-term reliability.
FWIW, my current strategy is to look at pricing for both the WD Red plus and the Seagate Ironwolf, and purchase whatever is cheapest. 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. I have had some drives that fail one of these tests, but pass the other.
Getting accurate info on drive reliability isn't easy - everyone has an anecdotal opinion based on their experience with a small sample size (including me). 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. Setting that aside, their stats aren't that great for Exos. But unfortunately, they don't have any Ironwolf drives in their mix.
amrob2 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.
Consumers getting USB drives are particularly sensitive to price, and it's hard to know exactly what the white-label drive specs are. SMR drives are particularly problematic for NAS, so IMO it is important to avoid them.
Personally I haven't shucked any - in large part because I value the warranty. 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.
Hard drives in the UK are ridiculously priced. A single Seagate Ironwolf 12TB is around £240. At the time I shucked the WD My Book Duos to get the WD Reds, the Reds retailed at close to £330 each yet I could get 2 Red's in a My Book Duo for around £480-£500. As I needed 26 12TB disks, it was a no-brainer to shuck and get the decent reds.
I will definitely be purchasing the CMR drives from whichever brand I go for. I don't need to panic just yet as I still have one spare 12TB WD Red drive ready for when another fails (which hopefully won't be for a while yet).
I have only ever had one Seagate drive before and that was many years ago and it came with a second hand desktop PC I bought. It had the awful click of death where you knew the heads would fail, but I was able to clone it easily onto some spare 250GB drives I had knocking around.
Like you say with your strategy, I will probably end up doing the same and going with whatever is cheapest at the time I buy (But as Amazon UK stock levels are so atrocious, the decision may be out of my hands). Thanks to "Brexit" prices are outrageous here and stock levels on lots of things are really cr@p - but the government will blame that all on the Russia/Ukraine war 🙄.
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