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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...
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.
Thanks for the update on the EFRX - it seems depending on the site you find information on it's either SMR or CMR!
I take your point on using bigger drives but given I am only at about 40% capacity, I'm happy with 4 TB given the age of the NAS (and me) lol.
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