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WD Red Drives, What I Actually Observed (Chap. 3)

Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2014 6:03 am
by GoetzVonBerlichingen
QNAP's money. QNAP's house. QNAP's rules.

I am a little surprised that this Forum's administrators/moderators decided to start selectively deleting my posts beginning mid-October 2014. I was given no notice that I had violated some rule, nor a notice that my posts were being deleted. Readers should understand that the content you read has been selectively edited to ensure QNAP remains happy. It's almost as if this "Community Forum" is, in fact, intended to be a Potemkin village, and not a real community.

QNAP's money. QNAP's house. QNAP's rules.

E'er the helpful type, I elected to help them eradicate traces of me, and deleted the contents of this post on 31 October 2014.

Re: I Bought WD 4TB Red Drives (Chap. 1 of a Long Story)

Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2014 11:19 pm
by scubajwd
Thank You for all your effort on this; I did read end to end your WD 4TB Red Trilogy as it were;
I just bought a WD 4TB "Red:" drive a few days back and have it in "single disk" test mode
in one of my file servers before I replace all 8 in my two newer Qnap file servers
Please keep the community posted if any of your new "reds" drop out..BTW, I'm running
4.0.5 on all my boxes and keep them as cool as possible in my server room

Re: I Bought WD 4TB Red Drives (Chap. 1 of a Long Story)

Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 10:11 am
by GoetzVonBerlichingen
QNAP's money. QNAP's house. QNAP's rules.

I am a little surprised that this Forum's administrators/moderators decided to start selectively deleting my posts beginning mid-October 2014. I was given no notice that I had violated some rule, nor a notice that my posts were being deleted. Readers should understand that the content you read has been selectively edited to ensure QNAP remains happy. It's almost as if this "Community Forum" is, in fact, intended to be a Potemkin village, and not a real community.

QNAP's money. QNAP's house. QNAP's rules.

E'er the helpful type, I elected to help them eradicate traces of me, and deleted the contents of this post on 31 October 2014.

Re: I Bought WD 4TB Red Drives (Chap. 1 of a Long Story)

Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 7:41 pm
by Briain
Hi

Interesting read! :)

Several years ago, I tried doing some research before buying a batch of disks (6 for me and another 8 for a customer) and found it difficult to obtain any real information about the differences between desktop and enterprise grade disks. I eventually opted for Samsung HE103 (1 TB enterprise disks) based on my great experience with the desktop variants I'd fitted to various NAS units (including my own ReadyNAS NV+). After asking a few questions via emails to Samsung, I was quite surprised when a Samsung engineer called me one day, and even more surprised to hear he was based in Edinburgh and thus only about 5 miles away! One question I asked was a out the weight difference quoted for the two disks which - from memory - was about 10 grams; I asked if this was down to enhanced mechanics and he indicated that was his understanding, but at the time, he couldn't obtain any written information to back that up (these were quite new at the time). Anyhow, we had an interesting chat and debated a few issues, but I suspect that with all disk manufactureres, the full information never escapes the design and testing departments due to the fierce competition between the various vendors.

In general, one thing I often wondered was whether enterprise disks applied more energy to reduce seek times (which I've always thought would make sense; lots of corporate customers demanding small files scattered across a disk would require the head to swiftly move to different parts of the platters) and when I read your post, I was wondering if that could have an impact on wear and thus be a contributing factor in the difference between load/unload count failure statistics between WD Red and WD SE disks (SE being fed higher currents and the head mechanism experiencing greater acceleration stresses), but that the WD RE shows 600,000 would kibosh that line of thinking unless they've specifically engineered that model to cope better than the others. Of course, there are no clues in the specifications (and the seek noise for all three is 3 dB above ambient noise, but that doesn't tell us anything useful as a small increase in acceleration performance might not make that much more noise).

It would be great (and extremely interesting) if the disk manufacturers released white papers explaining the differences between the models and their thinking behind many aspects of the design, but as I alluded to above, my suspicion is that the disk manufacturers have always operated in a culture of corporate secrecy and release the very minimum of information that they are obliged to release. If anything, it looks as though this is getting worse rather than better as specification sheets are 'dumbed down' into little more than you'd expect to see from a press release of an as yet unreleased new product.

Back to the Samsung disks and all these 14 disks I installed a few years ago are still going strong. 4 of my ones have been sitting in a TS-659 (my music server Qnap) and I've still two spares sitting in their boxes. Now that disks are available in such large capacities, I'm pondering moving from a RAID 6 Intel based NAS to one of the current ARM Qnaps with two good disks in RAID 1 (and leaving them spinning 24/7). I have always been weary of WD since the Green/Black/Blue issues (and have trust issues after reading the explanations given by WD) but having fitted a good few WD Red disks to customer Qnaps, I've been quite impressed. That said, this load unload issue (and the issue with disks being set with different parameters) makes me wonder if they're quite as trustworthy as they could be. I plan to look closely at the specs for the desktop and enterprise Hitachi disks before taking a decision, but it seems there are very few negative posts about these disks, so either almost nobody is using them, or they are just very good.

Bri

NB Sorry for any major typos; at the moment, I've no time to proof read the above ramblings and will thus have to do so later (and knowing me, there will be a good few). :ashamed: :D

Re: I Bought WD 4TB Red Drives (Chap. 1 of a Long Story)

Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2014 2:55 pm
by SpankyMcS
Hi, great analysis, thanx for your time...

Following the links for WDIdle3 I found that it was for the RE2-GP drives, so further looking found http://support.wd.com/product/download. ... 01&lang=en which is for the WD Red ie WD40EFRX drives.
I have downloaded but not run yet to test.

Again thanx for the insights :)

Spanky

Re: I Bought WD 4TB Red Drives (Chap. 1 of a Long Story)

Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2014 4:58 pm
by itsmarcos
Hi - many thanks for sharing your analysis and the excellent and clear write-up.

Your analysis helped me dismiss the purchase of an Se drive. Although, the specs and the warranty are appealing the heat issue held back my decision. Your post definitely sealed the case. The NAS I wanted to install it is not in a properly ventilated room where the ambient temperature might rise upto 40 degrees during summer.

Still skeptical though on the quality of the REDs - might go for a HGST NAS drive (specs)

Re: I Bought WD 4TB Red Drives (Chap. 1 of a Long Story)

Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2014 6:58 pm
by ihartley
I think you mde a number of errors:
1. SE drives are probably placed in different environments than other drives, so their "known failure rate" might be very different
2. You bought all of your drives from one batch/supplier, which significantly skews any statistics
3. Unlikely shipping caused an issue - drives are designed to stand xxxG whilst running, let alone parked

I DO value your posts. But in reality, and backed by a Google study, drives just, er, well, fail. Buy REDs if you want for extended warranty (I would). But don't expect magic from them. The fixing and torque of the screw is probably just as important as whether it's 10^14 or 10^ error.

Re: I Bought WD 4TB Red Drives (Chap. 1 of a Long Story)

Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2014 8:10 pm
by GoetzVonBerlichingen
QNAP's money. QNAP's house. QNAP's rules.

I am a little surprised that this Forum's administrators/moderators decided to start selectively deleting my posts beginning mid-October 2014. I was given no notice that I had violated some rule, nor a notice that my posts were being deleted. Readers should understand that the content you read has been selectively edited to ensure QNAP remains happy. It's almost as if this "Community Forum" is, in fact, intended to be a Potemkin village, and not a real community.

QNAP's money. QNAP's house. QNAP's rules.

E'er the helpful type, I elected to help them eradicate traces of me, and deleted the contents of this post on 31 October 2014.

Re: I Bought WD 4TB Red Drives (Chap. 1 of a Long Story)

Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2014 6:33 am
by aeonf242
I've been trying to get a couple of NAS's drives working with WD red 4TB and have failed each time.
I'm currently trying to get them to be recognised by a TS269L with no success!

Re: I Bought WD 4TB Red Drives (Chap. 1 of a Long Story)

Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2014 5:04 pm
by psikey
I've had 4 x 3TB Red's in my TS-469Pro and now using 4 x 4TB Red's in it. I had one of the 4TB Red's fail early on which was replaced within 5 days by WD (replacement came with a white label, not having the RED coloured section) and no problems since. My 4TB RED's did all come from one retailer but were purchased over a 3 month period.

Re: I Bought WD 4TB Red Drives (Chap. 1 of a Long Story)

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:08 am
by ToreBK
Thank you so much for your hard work, good thinking and this kind gesture of sharing your thoughts with the community. I not only read your WD40EFRX Trilogy with great interest, I even found it quite entertaining!

As I indicated in this QNAP Forum post, I too had some problems accepting WD's recommended limitations for Red's on more than 5-bays NAS boxes. It just didn't make sense to me, although I didn't think it through nearly as much as you obviously have!

I'm about to purchase yet another 8-bay NAS, and I will populate it with the WD50EFRX which now apparantly is delayed until 2Q14. I'm just hoping I will not have the same nightmare experience I had when 5 of 20 WD30EFRX failed on TS-869 Pro :shock:

Re: I Bought WD 4TB Red Drives (Chap. 1 of a Long Story)

Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 6:40 am
by ToreBK
How are those REDs holding up? I'm considering QNAP TS-EC1080 Pro 10-Bay with WD60EFRX, I wonder if you could be forum's Guinea-pig? :)

Re: I Bought WD 4TB Red Drives (Chap. 1 of a Long Story)

Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 5:12 pm
by schumaku
GoetzVonBerlichingen wrote:... What's up with WD providing S/W needing physical access to their drives in any format other than a bootable CD-ISO?
Look here, they do since last year -> http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=619&sid=201&lang=en

The Linux 32-bit build of the WD5741 Version 1 utility does run on for me on a TS-x69, copy to a share, and make it executable:

[/share/Public] # chmod 777 wd5741x32

List the drives:

[/share/Public] # ./wd5741x32 -d?
or
[/share/Public] # ./wd5741x32

Apply the update to disk N -> wd5741x32 -dN

[/share/Public] # ./wd5741x32 -d5
WD5741 Version 1
Update Drive
Copyright (C) 2013 Western Digital Corporation

WDC WD40EFRX-xxxxxxx xx.xxxxxx Drive update not needed

Re: I Bought WD 4TB Red Drives (Chap. 1 of a Long Story)

Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 12:41 am
by GoetzVonBerlichingen
QNAP's money. QNAP's house. QNAP's rules.

I am a little surprised that this Forum's administrators/moderators decided to start selectively deleting my posts beginning mid-October 2014. I was given no notice that I had violated some rule, nor a notice that my posts were being deleted. Readers should understand that the content you read has been selectively edited to ensure QNAP remains happy. It's almost as if this "Community Forum" is, in fact, intended to be a Potemkin village, and not a real community.

QNAP's money. QNAP's house. QNAP's rules.

E'er the helpful type, I elected to help them eradicate traces of me, and deleted the contents of this post on 31 October 2014.

Re: I Bought WD 4TB Red Drives (Chap. 1 of a Long Story)

Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 12:50 am
by doktornotor
GoetzVonBerlichingen wrote: Western Digital Corporation (WDC) should provide every one of their utilities as a bootable ISO.
Because there's a huge lack of bootable ISOs for Linux or FreeDOS... and because that's exactly what people do NOT want, mainly for the reason that there's nothing to boot the ISO from in the first place (no optical drive, no floppy). Plus - courtesy of junk like SecureBoot - booting similar stuff from anything external (USB included) is usually impossible without extensive messing with screwed up buggy (U)EFI settings. So, if anything, this should be provided in a memstick (USB flash disk) format. ISO seriously is useless for the purpose.
GoetzVonBerlichingen wrote: I still can not find any authoritative guidance about what WD5741 actually does. I do know that 2/3 of a recent batch of WD 4TB Reds I got had the WDIDLE3 timer set to "Disabled" and 1/3 had the timer set to "300 seconds."
It sets the timer to 300 seconds. It actually does something on those "brainfart" batches of drives where the timers were set to 8 seconds for absolutely unknown reason, causing the LCC counters to skyrocket to tens of thousands in weeks.