WDC Reds Not Suitable?

InteXX wrote:
StephenB wrote: So the Pro's will run hotter. Downside?

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gurumurthi/papers/acmtos13.pdf finds that disk failures increase as temperature rises. Per Table 3, disks that run at 40C or more fail at a higher rate. Disks running at 50C fail about 1.50 higher rate more often than drives that are < 40C.

Figure 5 shows a similar graph.

This is of course just one study, and there are other studies that reach different conclusions. But the downside is potentially shorter drive life.

There are plenty of ReadyNAS owners using 7200 rpm drives that report temps ~50C.

Obviously ReadyNAS running in cooler rooms will have lower drive temps.

Increasing the fan speed (not possible in the UI today) would also help, but the study didn't find that to be cost effective in a data center environment (figure 14). Though the NAS used in data centers are quite different from home NAS. Their test servers held 35 drives each, and they were increasing fan speeds from 7000RPM to 12000RPM. That increase only reduced drive temps by 5C.

InteXX wrote:
What would the ReadyNAS Maniac do?

I'm using mostly WDC Reds (11 altogether, in 4 NAS), and see temps around 30C in those systems. The performance is good enough for me (generally my systems are either CPU bound or network bound). Reliability has been excellent so far, though oldest RED drive I has is only 2 years old.

I plan to stick with WDC REDS for now. If I start seeing a lot of failures, I'll reassess.

If I were running a business (or had the NAS in an environment with conditioned air), I'd probably use RED Pro drives in one or two systems, and see how they worked out.