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armornone's avatar
armornone
Aspirant
Nov 22, 2012

Western Digital (WD) RED NAS hard drives a Ploy?

It looks like Western Digital( WD) is now selling specialized hard drive for RAID/NAS systems.

I thought the entire idea behind a RAID system is that you are using inexpensive disk as in non-specialized types of hard drive. Hence the " ID"=inexpensive disk in "RAID"
RAID( redundant array of inexpensive disks)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008JJLZ7G/ref ... KQ7K8Q80FR

I wonder if this is a ploy to try to get people to pay more money by thinking they need a special hard drive for a NAS or RAID system. Perhaps its a way that they can say that you voided your warranty if you use a non-red nas hard drive in your system.

I really find the need to use specialized hard drive horrible. I encountered this problem with my first home raid system of Buffalo. The tech sounded like his head was going to explode when I told him I had upgraded to larger capacity hard drives that I bought online.

I think Buffalo expects its uses to be incapable of replacing a hard drive and ask that you send the entire unit back if a hard drive dies so they can replace it with one of their specialized hard drives(cheap refurbished hard drives which were complete junk) . Hopefully, they have caught up with the times but I don't know.

I don't like this idea at all.

Thanks.
Issues with Boot|Installation|Upgrade|Expansion
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  • mdgm-ntgr's avatar
    mdgm-ntgr
    NETGEAR Employee Retired
    Jan 18, 2013
    Sounds like you bought from a bad batch. Unfortunate but it happens.

    I have 4 WD RED disks and all of mine are fine. I haven't had one WD Red drive fail yet
  • onimod's avatar
    onimod
    Aspirant
    Jan 18, 2013
    cyanideg wrote:
    Just bought 5 of these from newegg for my RNP Business Edition: HDD 2TB|WD WD20EFRX 64M OEM - Red

    Currently had 6 1TB discs and I needed to expand the volume. 2 of my current 2TB seagate drives have pending and reallocated sectors so it was time to expand.

    Installed the 1st disk, could hear the platters crunching, removed it and put in another, same issue... removed it, tried a 3rd disk, same issue. So 3/3 discs failed right out of the box Finally tried a 4th one and it booted, synced and passed SMART test.

    After the NAS was up with one new WD Red disc I decided to try my 5th and final drive from newegg. 5th one passed SMART data but when it was 5-10% complete syncing, the 1st WD Red drive failed and Frontview told me drive one and drive 3 were dead (both WD Red drives I just replaced.) So in a moment of panic I put both old drives back in the nas, rebooted, and thankfully the RAIDX2 volume booted.

    I am just finishing up transferring 4TB of data to external drives so i can buy some other drives. Newegg must have pulled these out of a garbage can. I was this close to losing all of my data.

    What I will do is:
    #1 Pay more than $108.99 for a 2TB drive and stay away from the WD Red.
    #2 Test each new drive on a PC by formatting long style, then testing SMART data.

    I cant believe out of 5 new drives, 3 failed, and the other 2 have issues (already RAW read data errors and pending bad sectors in SMART data). Im sending them back to Newegg to say the least.


    Sounds like someone drop kicked your package between Newegg and your front door - unlucky.
    Again, it's only anecdotal rather then significant of a pattern but I also have 4 WD Red 3TB drives running with no problems.

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