WD Red drives?

Zarathustra[H];1039299327 said:
I'm kind of curious about a couple of things:

1.) What kind of case are these 29 drives in? Must be pretty massive?

2.) What type of RAID is it? Hardware? ZFS?

3.) Most raid solutions do not allow for expanding the number of drives in the array, are you actually destroying the volume and recreating it when you add the 4 additional drives? If so, how are you backing up the 62.75TB on there? ((25-2)*3*(1000^4)/(1024^4))
Click to expand...

1.) Lian Li PC-343 with 6x 6-in-3 cages so it fit's 36 drives + I got a another case on top of that that got space for another 30 drives, and use a external SAS cable between them (SFF-8088).

2.) HW RAID6 with hot spare (and cold spare).

3.) Use Areca 1680 card + 2x HP SAS expanders in both cases, and yes my card allow to expand the raid.
And about the backup se a few post up.
 
Merlinen said:
Ain't fun to read the last few pages here :(

Geting a 4x 3TB RED drives to expand my curent raid 6 array of 25x 3TB Hitatchi 3TB drives.
Current array is almost full so need to expand it ASAP :(

Guess i am best of puting these 4x RED drives in a own array for a few weeks for testing.
Click to expand...

You want to mix a bunch of WD Reds in with a large Hitachi array, please baby jesus no, not to thread crap as WD Reds appear decent in small sets as they were designed, but any reason you didn't just wait for the Toshiba's that are now trickling out? They even still report as Hitachi for the device ID.

Also make sure that Areca 1680 is on the latest firmware, as the 1680 and WD used to not play nicely together - granted that was WD Greens and many firmware revs ago. Do a few surface scans on each and/or raidset init 4-5 times to vet them a bit more if you absolutely have to mix them in with your hitachi raidset. That's not a knock on these particular drives - its just reality that theyre still an unknown quantity in terms of track record and you'd want to do same with any drives new to the market.

If it were me I'd just start a new raidset with the WD Red's if you want to keep buying those. 25 drives in your existing raidset is already pushing your luck. Spanning an array across multiple server cases is also bad practice and asking for trouble. There was a time I ran 24 and 32 drive RAID6 arrays just for the hell of it and everything was backed up anyway, but the problem you will run into is that invariably you'll need/want to recreate the raidset at some point, or reconfigure your data layout strategy, and with raidsets that large they become "top heavy" and migrations you never anticipated needing become a PITFA later on. As the saying goes never let a woman get so fat you can't push her out the front door. These days I keep my raidsets mostly 12 drive RAID6, and that's strictly for the better manageability, not the fear of increased failure rate with larger raidsets.
 
Last edited:
odditory said:
You want to mix a bunch of WD Reds in with a large Hitachi array, please baby jesus no, not to thread crap as WD Reds appear decent in small sets as they were designed, but any reason you didn't just wait for the Toshiba's that are now trickling out? They even still report as Hitachi for the device ID.

Also make sure that Areca 1680 is on the latest firmware, as the 1680 and WD used to not play nicely together - granted that was WD Greens and many firmware revs ago. Do a few surface scans on each and/or raidset init 4-5 times to vet them a bit more if you absolutely have to mix them in with your hitachi raidset. That's not a knock on these particular drives - its just reality that theyre still an unknown quantity in terms of track record and you'd want to do same with any drives new to the market.

If it were me I'd just start a new raidset with the WD Red's if you want to keep buying those. 25 drives in your existing raidset is already pushing your luck. Spanning an array across multiple server cases is also bad practice and asking for trouble. There was a time I ran 24 and 32 drive RAID6 arrays just for the hell of it and everything was backed up anyway, but the problem you will run into is that invariably you'll need/want to recreate the raidset at some point, or reconfigure your data layout strategy, and with raidsets that large they become "top heavy" and migrations you never anticipated needing become a PITFA later on. As the saying goes never let a woman get so fat you can't push her out the front door. These days I keep my raidsets mostly 12 drive RAID6, and that's strictly for the better manageability, not the fear of increased failure rate with larger raidsets.
Click to expand...

Ye did starts reading about the Toshiba drives today, and now I might leave the RED drives in it's own array (or send them back never did like WD drives) to dump some data until I get some Toshiba drives, but need to find some more info about them (Toshiba DT01ABA300).

Dunno why i have missed the Toshiba drives :confused:

And ofc my Areca card is up to date on it's FW.

And I am planning on keep the arrays in 1 case only (about 28+2 hot spare), was never the plane to have same array split in 2 cases, so 1 case 1 array.

Did try and find 3-4 more Hitachi drives so the first case was Hitachi drives only and so I could start a new array in the other case but didn’t find any :(
 
So far I'm happy with my Toshiba drives, even still say made by Hitachi all over them. If I hadn't read about them I would have gone with the Red drives, but with all the issues and RMA times...Glad I didn't.
 
Hop-Scotch said:
So far I'm happy with my Toshiba drives, even still say made by Hitachi all over them. If I hadn't read about them I would have gone with the Red drives, but with all the issues and RMA times...Glad I didn't.
Click to expand...

I think the WD Reds will be okay in time, the DOA reports will settle down but biggest problem is the pricing is a little obnoxious right now, $189.99 for 3TB, that's not value for money relative to competitive offerings that are RAID/NAS friendly for much less. I'd wait for the price to come down to at least $140 if I were seriously interested in these. And in WD's arrogance that may be a while because their marketing has been very effective with people that just accept at face value that these are the only non-enterprise RAID/NAS drives on the market..
 
odditory said:
I think the WD Reds will be okay in time, the DOA reports will settle down but biggest problem is the pricing is a little obnoxious right now, $189.99 for 3TB, that's not value for money relative to competitive offerings that are RAID/NAS friendly for much less. I'd wait for the price to come down to at least $140 if I were seriously interested in these. And in WD's arrogance that may be a while because their marketing has been very effective with people that just accept at face value that these are the only non-enterprise RAID/NAS drives on the market..
Click to expand...

Their own greens seem to work just fine in RAID/NAS for me...
 
Zarathustra[H];1039304120 said:
Their own greens seem to work just fine in RAID/NAS for me...
Click to expand...

WDC green models that are a few generations old ( older <= EADS) could have their TLER state toggled with wdtler.exe . Green models after EADS, 2009+ have this functionality disabled/locked. Using newer WDC green models in RAID is analogous to playing russian roulette.
 
1010 said:
WDC green models that are a few generations old ( older <= EADS) could have their TLER state toggled with wdtler.exe . Green models after EADS, 2009+ have this functionality disabled/locked. Using newer WDC green models in RAID is analogous to playing russian roulette.
Click to expand...

Hmm.

I had 5 newer green models in my Drobo S for 2 years without a single issue.

Now I have replaced the Drobo with FreeNAS, and I have 6 newer WD Greens in it running rock solid. No problems at all.

In what kind of setups have people had problems?
 
Zarathustra[H];1039304232 said:
Hmm.

I had 5 newer green models in my Drobo S for 2 years without a single issue.

Now I have replaced the Drobo with FreeNAS, and I have 6 newer WD Greens in it running rock solid. No problems at all.

In what kind of setups have people had problems?
Click to expand...

Hardware and software RAID 5/6 setups or any RAID level with parity. I'm sure if you search the forums or on google you'll find plenty of documented cases of green drives EARZ etc dropping out of arrays at random
 
1010 said:
Hardware and software RAID 5/6 setups or any RAID level with parity. I'm sure if you search the forums or on google you'll find plenty of documented cases of green drives EARZ etc dropping out of arrays at random
Click to expand...

I did some more searches.

Apparently I don't have to worry about this with FreeNAS even with parity RAID arrays. ZFS and RAIDz apparently work differently than hardware RAID and never drop drives. It will just patiently wait until it hears back from the drive. It can cause some momentary slowdowns, but never any issues like with hardware RAID controllers.

Presumably the Drobo S was designed to operate similarly, as I also never had any problems with it (other than performance) over the ~2 years I used it.
 
Hi,

any experience with WD Red 3TB in Backblaze?
5k3000 hard to get. Or any other suggestions for backblaze?
 
saw that. I've been waiting for the fake "samsung hd204ui" seagate thingies to drop in price again, last time they were $99 I bought a few, I have a home file/backup server with 6 drive raid6 mdadm with all older real samsung hd204uis and a couple of the newer seagate branded ones. I've been thinking about expanding. Wonder if I should wait for a price drop on those or if I should just add these...

One of the 2tb WD green drives EARX I had DID drop out of my raid6 once or twice before I replaced it with a samsung. I just use the wd green drive as a 2tb offline backup drive of a couple things I have duplicated in multiple places.
 
I just for 2 3 tbs red, Seems like om og the drives fails when trying top film the drive. I filled the first drive with No probloms i will post more info when i get home. But i tryed top find latest firmware om wd site, but cant find it ? Anyone have a link and maby there is a tool from wd too test drives with too ?
 
Just got two WD Red 2TB disks for a RAID 1 setup, decided to test them both as single-disks before mirroring them and discovered something odd...

The first drive checks out perfectly. Read speeds look exactly like I'd expect when comparing against reviews.

vw0L5.png



Then I checked the second drive... it performed so much slower that HD Tune actually adjusted its scale down a notch

7h0eD.png



Don't mind the burst rates, one drive is connected to a SATA II port and the other is connected to a SATA III port. Even if I swap the ports they're on, the slow drive remains slow and the fast drive remains fast.

So...What's the deal? Is the second drive a dud?
 
Unknown-One said:
What's the deal? Is the second drive a dud? (Don't mind the burst rates, one drive is connected to a SATA II port and the other is connected to a SATA III port. Even if I swap the ports they're on, the slow drive remains slow and the fast drive remains fast.
Click to expand...

~6% difference, within tolerances.. Drive looks fine, run DBAN for 3 days to be sure.
 
The drives perform equally. the scale is just down because of the bursts that are high in the first one. there will always be a few MB's difference between disks. Hell, there is even difference on the same disk between scans.
 
kache said:
Any news on WDRED 4TB drives?
Click to expand...

We haven't heard anything, and honestly I don't expect to until larger drives start to hit. If you need the storage density, they will push you into buying the 4TB RE drives in SAS or SATA for the significantly higher margins they can extract from you. There is no benefit to them at this time for them to offer one.
 
mwroobel said:
We haven't heard anything, and honestly I don't expect to until larger drives start to hit. If you need the storage density, they will push you into buying the 4TB RE drives in SAS or SATA for the significantly higher margins they can extract from you. There is no benefit to them at this time for them to offer one.
Click to expand...

Can the RE drives be run in NAS environment without issues?
 
tazeat said:
saw that. I've been waiting for the fake "samsung hd204ui" seagate thingies to drop in price again, last time they were $99 I bought a few, I have a home file/backup server with 6 drive raid6 mdadm with all older real samsung hd204uis and a couple of the newer seagate branded ones. I've been thinking about expanding. Wonder if I should wait for a price drop on those or if I should just add these...

One of the 2tb WD green drives EARX I had DID drop out of my raid6 once or twice before I replaced it with a samsung. I just use the wd green drive as a 2tb offline backup drive of a couple things I have duplicated in multiple places.
Click to expand...

Well, can't comment on long term, but short term it added fine (up to 7 2tb drives in raid6) and is playing nice with the samsungs, added another 60MB/s on the overall read speed (up to about 340 MB/s average, depending on benchmarking tool, writes around 240 MB/s or so) which may not be equal to a whole another drive in performance, but a healthy gain none the less. Either way, easily saturates gigabit lan.
 
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
Red Falcon said:
What's so "gimmicky" about these drives? :confused:
They do what they say they do, and perform accordingly.

They aren't being touted as enterprise-grade.
They are simply desktop-class drives designed for 24/7, RAID, and multi-drive environments and are stated as such.

Seriously, WTF are you talking about?
Click to expand...

hitachi has been selling non-enterprise grade drives that have been capable of this for quite some time now in their normal hard drive lineup. they don't have a green blue and red lines with intentionally disabled and enabled features that make a drive bad at something and good at another. these red drives are just nonbroken green drives, greens should have been capable of this from the start. it's a joke that anyone would support WD with the garbage they put out.

I can take my hitachi drive and use it as a single drive for storage. I can take it and use it as my single drive for the OS. I can take it and use it in a raid1 on my intel ports. I can take it and use it in a raid6 on an lsi raid controller, or an adaptec raid controller, or a NAS or anywhere I freaking want and it's not going to randomly drop from the array. with WD you buy a drive, but oops you bought a green drive, you can't use it as a desktop OS drive or in a raid with parity because it's going to drop out. bought a blue drive? can't raid it, must get a red drive at a slower speed so you can run it in raid. bought a red drive? great, now it's the year 2012 and you can finally make a raid array using your consumer drives that won't explode.

I don't have to do stupid workarounds either. if I use a hitachi drive, I don't have to intentionally run a soft raid so the drives don't drop. I can run a softraid if my case calls for it, or a hard raid if it doesn't. there's no limitations, the 7200 drive I buy from hitachi can be used in any place I need it. these red drives are gimmicks from WD where they fixed their green line and resold them under a different color due to their terrible reputation.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6157/...eview-are-nasoptimized-hdds-worth-the-premium

Less aggressive head parking (no IntelliPark feature)
Click to expand...

we turned off the bullshit feature for the green drives

Configurable Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER), with a default of 7 seconds
Click to expand...

we turned on the feature we've been intentionally leaving disabled on some drives that are fully capable of it
 
Last edited:
^ You obviously do not know the differences between consumer-grade and enterprise-grade drives with everything you just wrote.
I'm really not trying to insult you on this, seriously, but I would highly suggest reading up on the differences, as they are more than just the addition of TLER.

Even though the Red drives are desktop-class, they do have some enterprise-like features similar to RAFF and are a bit heavier duty than regular desktop-class drives.
Also, there are WD Green drives with IntelliPark disabled, aka GP-AV drives, designed for 24/7 operation with more robust platter motors and better simultaneous-write capabilities for tasks such as video-security and surveillance recording.

You stated that Hitachi (of which their HDD-line is owned by WD, just fyi) does not have Green, Blue, Red, etc. drives.
In reality, they do have drive models that coincide with WD's drive branding, as does Seagate, so your statement is entirely incorrect.

with WD you buy a drive, but oops you bought a green drive, you can't use it as a desktop OS drive or in a raid with parity because it's going to drop out. bought a blue drive? can't raid it, must get a red drive at a slower speed so you can run it in raid. bought a red drive? great, now it's the year 2012 and you can finally make a raid array using your consumer drives that won't explode.
Click to expand...
Well, one shouldn't act like a fucking dolt by using a non-TLER HDD in a fake or hardware RAID array; you obviously know the difference, so what's the issue?
If you need a drive for a non-software RAID array, then don't buy WD desktop-class drives outside of there Red line, duh. :rolleyes:
ZOMG, or one could buy a non-WD HDD with TLER enabled! :eek: :rolleyes:

As for the last two things you wrote, while I do agree with you that it's a bit lame, but no one is forcing you to buy their products, especially if you know the difference.
These were clearly business-oriented decisions that WD made to improve sales (it obviously worked), and while we may not agree with them, that doesn't mean everyone is forced to buy their Red drives. ;)


You obviously have more of a need for a Hitachi (or TLER-enabled) HDD, and no one is stopping you from buying their products and forcing you to buy WD HDDs, so why all the rage?
Your post seems like more of a rant without any actual points that weren't already glaringly obvious.

If you don't like it, just don't buy WD, boom, problem solved.
 
Last edited:
Red Falcon said:
As for the last two things you wrote, while I do agree with you that it's a bit lame, but no one is forcing you to buy their products, especially if you know the difference.
These were clearly business-oriented decisions that WD made to improve sales (it obviously worked), and while we may not agree with them, that doesn't mean everyone is forced to buy their Red drives. ;)


You obviously have more of a need for a Hitachi (or TLER-enabled) HDD, and no one is stopping you from buying their products and forcing you to buy WD HDDs, so why all the rage?
Your post seems like more of a rant without any actual points that weren't already glaringly obvious.

If you don't like it, just don't buy WD, boom, problem solved.
Click to expand...

I actually can't not buy WD since they bought hitachi. I just hope they don't ruin the brand by intentionally removing software features from drives and then splitting everything off on me into a rainbow of colors. my world was a lot easier with hitachi where the only choice was 5400 or 7200.
 
gjs278 said:
I actually can't not buy WD since they bought hitachi. I just hope they don't ruin the brand by intentionally removing software features from drives and then splitting everything off on me into a rainbow of colors. my world was a lot easier with hitachi where the only choice was 5400 or 7200.
Click to expand...

Yes, but the Hitachi division isn't exactly using the same technology as WD, the two drive lines are still different, at least for now.
As for the 5400 and 7200RPM drives, there need to be different categories, as this day and age one or two drive variable does not and will not fit all.

Yes, I do think WD's naming scheme is silly with the colors, but it is identifiable and does make it easier for the average user/consumer.
Hitachi and Seagate both do this as well, only with a bit of a better naming scheme.
 
Red Falcon said:
Yes, but the Hitachi division isn't exactly using the same technology as WD, the two drive lines are still different, at least for now.
As for the 5400 and 7200RPM drives, there need to be different categories, as this day and age one or two drive variable does not and will not fit all.

Yes, I do think WD's naming scheme is silly with the colors, but it is identifiable and does make it easier for the average user/consumer.
Hitachi and Seagate both do this as well, only with a bit of a better naming scheme.
Click to expand...

I really don't see as many choices under hitachi as WD. what's the blue/black/red/green equivalents in the hitachi lineup?
 
Hitachi is gone and WD will not sell Hitachi consumer drives, Toshiba will (is already doing it).

Hitachi had a more "user friendly" policy because they were small fish, indeed here in Europe they were almost impossible to find, while WD and Seagate are everywhere, and even Samsung drives were far more common.
 
gjs278 said:
I really don't see as many choices under hitachi as WD. what's the blue/black/red/green equivalents in the hitachi lineup?
Click to expand...

As the poster below you indicated, Hitachi's consumer drives will now be sold by Toshiba, not Western Digital. Toshiba has already released what appears to be a solid set of consumer drives (there are thread about them on this forum). The firmware on these Toshiba drives even displays them as Hitachi drives. I'm still waiting on a good review before I decide between the Toshiba drives and WD REDs, for my next NAS build.
 
Had my replacement RED installed for a week now, so far so good and the pair are working nicely together. Hopefully I just got unlucky the first time around.
 
mwroobel said:
Well, the 24 3TB Reds are mounted and slid in. 2 were DOA. 1 failed SMART after 10 minutes with reallocations. 1 failed DBAN after 3 passes. The drives came from 2 different resellers, and the 4 drives that gave up the ghost had almost consecutive serials dated 24 Jun 2012 from Malaysia. Not an encouraging sign at all, but could just be a bad batch with the close serial failures.
Click to expand...

I got a Malaysia (24 Oct 2012) batch myself, 3/4 of the drives died within 24 hours and the remaining died under bcwipe stress testing. Average MTBF: 37 hours.

Further, I've been on hold with Western Digital's special support line for 202min as of this post.

Also, thanks for the info in this thread, I registered to respond. I just wish I found it before my purchase. :)

Some output for others hunting for this thread:
Device Model: WDC WD30EFRX-68AX9N0
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 133 133 140 Pre-fail Always FAILING_NOW 1967

Error 50 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 37 hours (1 days + 13 hours)
After command completion occurred, registers were:
ER ST SC SN CL CH DH
-- -- -- -- -- -- --
04 61 45 00 00 00 a0 Device Fault; Error: ABRT

Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- --------------------
ef 03 45 00 00 00 a0 00 13:18:27.073 SET FEATURES [Set transfer mode]
ec 00 00 00 00 00 a0 00 13:18:26.893 IDENTIFY DEVICE
ec 00 00 00 00 00 a0 00 13:18:21.179 IDENTIFY DEVICE
ef 03 45 00 00 00 a0 00 13:18:21.159 SET FEATURES [Set transfer mode]
ec 00 00 00 00 00 a0 00 13:18:21.039 IDENTIFY DEVICE
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top