I have many ReadyNAS units and always used Western Digital 3TB and 4TB Red drives. I have a new project where I need a ton of storage and need to splurge on about ten 8TB drives.
I see that people are shucking external drives to find White Label drives that are very similar to Reds except for two things.
1. You have to cover the 3rd 3.3v pin with Kapton tape so it will turn on.
2. You have to enable TLER since it is not enabled on the White Label drives (It is on the Reds). I know you can set the TLER but apparently, it will lose that setting on power down...
I was looking at WD80EZAZ White Label drives, but dont want to buy anything is I am going to run into issues down the road...
Re: Western Digital White Label Drives In ReadyNAS
I am not aware of any ReadyNAS that includes the 3.3V on the SATA interface, those pins are just open; so taping over the power enable pin should not be necessary. The Pro6 definately does not.
Since Netgear includes some drives that do not support TLER on their compatibility list, I'm not sure why you believe enabling it is a must. Here is an interesting article on the subject: Should-you-use-tler-drives-in-your-raid-nas .
Re: Western Digital White Label Drives In ReadyNAS
So what Im reading is this:
"The responses I received from Synology, QNAP, NETGEAR and Buffalo all indicated that their NAS RAID controllers don't depend on or even listen to TLER, CCTL, ERC or any other similar error recovery signal from their drives. Instead, their software RAID controllers have their own criteria for drive timeouts, retries and when a drive is finally marked bad."
If this is true, then having drives with TLER in not needed because OS6 handles things its own way, correct?
"So investing in these more expensive drives is probably a smart move if your NAS is under constant heavy use. But it will be the more robust drive construction and not TLER / CCTL / ERC that will make your RAID NAS more reliable."
The WD White Label drives are some of the better drives they are talking about correct?
According to this link they are actually all HGST Helium Enterprise drives which is also good, correct?
The WD White Label drives are some of the better drives they are talking about correct?
According to this link they are actually all HGST Helium Enterprise drives which is also good, correct?
Would you use White Label drives in your setup?
Other links I've seen say they are white-labeled WD Reds. So WD might relabel a variety of drives (perhaps depending on inventory). Reds make more sense to me though, since power and heat are factors with USB drives, and 5400 rpm models would use less power and run a lot cooler.
I've never used one myself (though I've sometimes been tempted to try one in my backup NAS). There are folks who've posted here saying that they used the drives successfully.
One factor is that you do give up the warranty (and the ability to return to the seller) as soon as you shuck the drives.
Re: Western Digital White Label Drives In ReadyNAS
Given the number of DoA and infant mortality drives we see reported here (most where the poster suspects the NAS, as it just can't be that brand new drive), I would not take a chance on drives without any warranty, even from the seller.
"The responses I received from Synology, QNAP, NETGEAR and Buffalo all indicated that their NAS RAID controllers don't depend on or even listen to TLER, CCTL, ERC or any other similar error recovery signal from their drives. Instead, their software RAID controllers have their own criteria for drive timeouts, retries and when a drive is finally marked bad."
If this is true, then having drives with TLER in not needed because OS6 handles things its own way, correct?
This is amost completely wrong.
1. Complete B.S. Syno, QNAP, Netgear (dunno 100% sure for Buffalo) do NOT make use of RAID controllers on thier NAS. Most is typically classic Linux MD device ...
2. There is neither a "listen" nor a TLER/CCTL/ERC signal - if a drive does go into a deep error recovery process - this can take up to several minutes - and the process does exceed about 7 seconds, drives are ejected from a RAID. E
3. Enabling the feature (the designation depends on the HDD maker - it's all thre same) does limit the error recovery time to less than seven seconds.
4. Drives need (much) less spare blocks (or virtual block or sector replacement), because of the deep error recovery is often effective, certainly for a while. Manufaturers want to avoid this, want to take advantege of the deep recovery process, sell thse drives for less - but often don't allow enabling the TLER bit.
5. The drive does not have to be marked bad - it's simply thrown out of the RAID - depending on the redundancy ... figure bye-bye data.
