My Experience with WD Red 2TBs

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lavrys
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My Experience with WD Red 2TBs

Post by lavrys »

This is not a question, just a micro-review: sharing my experience.
I have now bought a grand total of nine (9) of these babies, over 6 years: WD Red 2TB

- Two (2) of them were defective new, right from the store.
One of those was sent to WD on warranty, they replaced it with a refurbished one, which felt scammy - my drive was new. The other was exchanged at the store.
- Of the nine, two (2) have failed after ~2,000 hours of fairly light use. Unclear how WD derives their alleged MTBF of 1,000,000 hours (114 years).

Those seem like very poor percentages to me. Just saying.
Other than that, they're fine.
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OneCD
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Re: My Experience with WD Red 2TBs

Post by OneCD »

Hi and welcome to the forum. :)

What is the exact model of these drives? Are they all the same?

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lavrys
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Re: My Experience with WD Red 2TBs

Post by lavrys »

Well, the first five were all the same model, six years ago, one failed on install and was replaced with refurbished - not sure on their exact model any more.

When two more failed, 6 years later (last week) I bought four new ones, kept the old refurbished as my emergency spare. One of the new ones also failed on install.
These new ones are WDC WD20EFAX-68FB5N0 82.00A82
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OneCD
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Re: My Experience with WD Red 2TBs

Post by OneCD »

lavrys wrote: Fri Oct 02, 2020 7:29 am These new ones are WDC WD20EFAX-68FB5N0 82.00A82
Are you aware these are SMR drives? viewtopic.php?f=45&t=154346

Unsuitable for NAS. :(

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lavrys
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Re: My Experience with WD Red 2TBs

Post by lavrys »

F*ck me gently with a chainsaw. I had no idea.
More misleading behaviour from WD I guess.

Thank you.

Well, I guess I will slowly replace them, one at a time. Just to be clear, which models are NOT SMR?
Someone said "-EFRX"?
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OneCD
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Re: My Experience with WD Red 2TBs

Post by OneCD »

lavrys wrote: Fri Oct 02, 2020 7:40 am Well, I guess I will slowly replace them, one at a time. Just to be clear, which models are NOT SMR?
Someone said "-EFRX"?
Yup, EFRX models are fine. I have 5 of them still going strong after 65,000+ hours. :D

Checkout this infographic for the models to avoid:

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lavrys
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Re: My Experience with WD Red 2TBs

Post by lavrys »

Thanks.
Much appreciated
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beshur
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Re: My Experience with WD Red 2TBs

Post by beshur »

OneCD wrote:
lavrys wrote: Fri Oct 02, 2020 7:29 am These new ones are WDC WD20EFAX-68FB5N0 82.00A82
Are you aware these are SMR drives? viewtopic.php?f=45&t=154346

Unsuitable for NAS. :(
Do the SMRs get extra load in RAID because they have to rewrite entire strips at some point?

Sent from my SM-G950F using Tapatalk

TS-253B-8G | 2x WD Red Plus 8Tb
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dolbyman
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Re: My Experience with WD Red 2TBs

Post by dolbyman »

As even tiny writes need to write a whole chunk (265MB?), random writes will slow the array to a crawl.

In situations like scrubbing or rebuild they could even get kicked out of the array because of that
grayhicks
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Re: My Experience with WD Red 2TBs

Post by grayhicks »

The opinions here suggest that EFRX drives are better, I would beware of that.

I bought 4 no. 6 TB WD Red EFRX drives some 3 years ago. All 4 were immediately defective and, fortunately, were replaced by the seller by 4 more WD Red EFRX drives. In the last 6 months, 3 of those drives have failed without any advance warning showing up on the SMART system. The QNAP NAS (TS-451+) sent me an email when each one went down and each time I logged in to the NAS to find that a drive had failed and had to be immediately replaced. The remaining WD Red drive has only 26,000 hours on it, so the failed ones would have had fewer hours logged.

I don't think my usage is hard, this NAS is used purely as backup. My working drive is a Drobo 5-bay unit on which I store, edit, delete my multimedia - music, videos and photos. This is the drive which gets by far the most use, it has Seagate drives which have never given me a single problem in years. I set up backup to occur once a week to the QNAP, so that basically is the only time files are written to the WD Reds.

I have replaced the 3 failed WD Reds with re-furbushed Toshiba drives and I will never buy another WD drive.
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OneCD
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Re: My Experience with WD Red 2TBs

Post by OneCD »

grayhicks wrote: Fri Nov 13, 2020 2:07 pm The opinions here suggest that EFRX drives are better, I would beware of that.
The opinions here suggest that EFRX are better suited to NAS usage than EFAX. Nothing more. ;)

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