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Forum Discussion
Replacing failed 3TB disk in ReadyNAS Ultra 6 with 4 TB disk
My ReadyNAS Ultra 6 has a "degraded" volume due to one of the 6 x 3TB drives failing. The drives are all WD Red 3TB (WD Red WD30EFRX) What would be the largest drive I can replace the failed drive w...
I'm also a bit confused that it is still showing 13.61 TB of 13.62 TB - does that mean there is no RAID until the new disk goes in?
Not that I will put much on there until then!
jimot wrote:
I'm also a bit confused that it is still showing 13.61 TB of 13.62 TB - does that mean there is no RAID until the new disk goes in?
It should be showing the same capacity. But I wouldn't worry about something that small.
You certainly have RAID (files wouldn't be accessible if you didn't). But since the volume is degraded, you have no RAID redundancy. So if another disk fails, you will lose your data.
Performance is slower when the volume is degraded. Whenever the data blocks on the missing disk need to be read, the NAS instead has to reconstruct that data from the information on the remaining disks.
My NAS in it's degraded state seems to be operating quite nicely whilst I await the new drive however I have been reading a number of posts re mixing SMR and CMR drives - some say it's a horror story, others the opposite.
I'm hoping to replacing a 3 TB WD Red (SMR) (WD30EFRX) with a 4 TB WD Red Plus (CMR) (WD40EFPX) - should I go or should I stay?
I should add that the original drives are nearly 8 years old so despite the naysayers they have given good service however it's the SMR/CMR issue that now worries me.
jimot wrote:
I'm hoping to replacing a 3 TB WD Red (SMR) (WD30EFRX) with a 4 TB WD Red Plus (CMR) (WD40EFPX) - should I go or should I stay?
The WD30EFRX is actually CMR, so no worries there. Back when the WD30EFRX was launched (2012), no one was selling SMR drives.
WD re-branded in 2020 after the SMR misstep - creating the WD Red Plus line, and shifting the CMR drives to that line. So even though the WD30EFRX label says "WD Red", it is CMR.
I am still using several WD30EFRX in one of my own NAS, with two 8 TB WD Plus and one 8 TB Seagate Ironwolf in the same array. I've had no issues at all with the mix & match.
FWIW, If your goal is expansion later on, then it would be more cost-effective to go with a bigger drive. If you have enough capacity, then of course the 4 TB size is fine (since WD no longer has a 3 TB Red Plus).
And when the time comes, the issue with SMR drives has nothing to do with mixing them. You simply never want to use them in a RAID configuration, except perhaps in a strictly archival server (far more reads than writes). After WD changed the red's to SMR but before they admitted it, my NAS with a single SMR replacement drive suddenly took 10X the time for re-sync and scrubs. Writes of large files were also very slow, but I never actually timed it. I shudder to think what it would have added with even more SMR drives.
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