WD Easystore External Discussion

xrayos said:
I have 2 of these 8tb reds in my NAS box. Dunno if I should install the other 2 for RAID 5. Anyone think the prices will go lower?
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Prices can ever only go down; but probably not any time soon. Maybe around Black Friday/Cyber Monday? Or the sale on these might disappear and when that time of year comes they'll just discount it again at the same rate. No way to be 100% sure.

They just released a 10TB Red Drive too which is really expensive $/TB in comparison.

If I already had a NAS, I'd get more but 2 is fine for me for now. Personal preference. I'm kinda OCD in that I'd grab more to populate a NAS so that all the drives are the same age with relatively the same amount of operating hours on them.
 
Deal worked for me on Saturday online. Out for delivery today! Looking forward to the upgrade.
 
I have the say the speeds are pretty good. about 150mb/sec for transfers. hopefully these don't crap out after 1 or 2 years.
 
iDShaDoW said:
I'm kinda OCD in that I'd grab more to populate a NAS so that all the drives are the same age with relatively the same amount of operating hours on them.
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Isn't it better to have different age and operating hours to prevent all the drives dying at the same time?
 
XP1 said:
Isn't it better to have different age and operating hours to prevent all the drives dying at the same time?
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There's no evidence that drives purchased / manufactuered together will die together. There is a good reason to have all the drives be the same model, type and manufacturing batch to ensure they have very similar performance characteristics.
 
do you guys notice the drive making a clicking noise every 3-5 seconds? would be more noticeable outside the shell.
 
DF-1 said:
do you guys notice the drive making a clicking noise every 3-5 seconds? would be more noticeable outside the shell.
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I did at first, I was worried, but it past 48hrs of testing so I cracked it open and stuck it in my 4bay enclosure

also I ordered and shipped from BB.com and got Made in Thailand
 
DF-1 said:
do you guys notice the drive making a clicking noise every 3-5 seconds? would be more noticeable outside the shell.
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I did not notice this, but when I tested in-shell they were prob 8 feet away.

Currently I have 5 of them in a NAS just 1-2 feet from my ears and I can't believe how quiet they are. I get the seek noises and a low hum but it's amazingly tolerable. Of course when I'm done setting things up they'll be in another room.

I have them in an 1817+ and didn't have enough drives to fill the chassis so I stuck a couple old Intel 180GB SSDs in as cache. I'm on the fence with whether I want to use the PCIE slot to add a pair of NVMe drives for cache, or add a 10Gb NIC. It'll be for home office and family use only, the bulk of the actual storage for video distribution. I'd like to offload as many of my work files to the device as possible, but unsure how much benefit these 2 upgrades would be without the other. It seems that a single user can't really benefit from 10Gb without the SSDs and don't really benefit from the SSDs without the 10Gb interface. Obviously this would be different in an office environment with many users.

Sorry now I'm rambling in the wrong thread.
 
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brentsg said:
I did not notice this, but when I tested in-shell they were prob 8 feet away.

Currently I have 5 of them in a NAS just 1-2 feet from my ears and I can't believe how quiet they are. I get the seek noises and a low hum but it's amazingly tolerable. Of course when I'm done setting things up they'll be in another room.

I have them in an 1817+ and didn't have enough drives to fill the chassis so I stuck a couple old Intel 180GB SSDs in as cache. I'm on the fence with whether I want to use the PCIE slot to add a pair of NVMe drives for cache, or add a 10Gb NIC. It'll be for home office and family use only, the bulk of the actual storage for video distribution. I'd like to offload as many of my work files to the device as possible, but unsure how much benefit these 2 upgrades would be without the other. It seems that a single user can't really benefit from 10Gb without the SSDs and don't really benefit from the SSDs without the 10Gb interface. Obviously this would be different in an office environment with many users.

Sorry now I'm rambling in the wrong thread.
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If you're using RAID 0 with say 3 drives, then you should be able to read/write close to 3x the bandwidth you get from one single drive, so assuming we typically get ~150MB/s from a single 8TB RED, you should easily be able to get > ~400MB/s from 3 8TB REDs in a RAID 0 configuration. This is where that 10Gb interface really comes in handy. I normally have a RAID 0 setup with several drives along with a separate RAID 5 volume and periodically sync the RAID 0 volume with the RAID 5 volume for backup. If the RAID 0 volume goes down due to a bad disk, I can replace the bad disk and rebuilt it with the sync'd raid 5 volume. If the raid 5 volume goes down then I can either rebuild the raid 5 volume by itself, or rebuild it with the data from the RAID 0 volume. For example 2x 8TB in RAID 0 gives you a 14.4TB volume, and 3x 8TB in RAID 5 gives you another 14.4TB volume, then expose the RAID 0 over the network, keeping the RAID 5 volume internal.

I've got 6 out of the 9 I ordered and the other 3 are being delivered tomorrow. So far I have 5 China drives and 1 Thailand. I'm hoping the final 3 that are arriving tomorrow are Thailand drives so I'll have a good mix of both.
 
Zangmonkey said:
What are you using to scan the disks?
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Don't know if this was directed at someone in particular; or to everyone in general but...

It's always good to start with Western Digital's Data Lifeguard tool.

From there, you can pick whatever you like.

I like HD Tune myself.

Archaea said:
Deals over - :(
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The deal has come and gone a lot over the past few weeks, just check in now and then and someone will say it's back or just refresh the Best Buy page.
 
Someone in this thread mentioned spinrite. I haven't used my copy in years. Is there a workaround for large drives? I've tried all of the legit DOS bootable USB shenanigans, but no joy.
 
Some people are getting 8tb reds with double the cache to 256mb. Wonder why the change.

Specifically these shucked drives show up with model #WD80EFAX vs standard WD80EFZX
 
I got two of the drives. Both China, WD80EFZ. Shucked them both no problems. The PDF guide was awesome!

If you are using these in Desktop computers something to note: the hole pattern on the drive tray from my Fractal Design R4 does not match the WD80EFZ, so I could only use two screws to attach it. The other end of the drive is just supported by the rubber grommets underneath it.

The previous drive that fit the pattern fine was a HGST 4TB Deskstar NAS.
 
ClockerXP said:
I got two of the drives. Both China, WD80EFZ. Shucked them both no problems. The PDF guide was awesome!

If you are using these in Desktop computers something to note: the hole pattern on the drive tray from my Fractal Design R4 does not match the WD80EFZ, so I could only use two screws to attach it. The other end of the drive is just supported by the rubber grommets underneath it.

The previous drive that fit the pattern fine was a HGST 4TB Deskstar NAS.
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I found the same problem with my Fractal Design Node 605
 
ClockerXP said:
I got two of the drives. Both China, WD80EFZ. Shucked them both no problems. The PDF guide was awesome!

If you are using these in Desktop computers something to note: the hole pattern on the drive tray from my Fractal Design R4 does not match the WD80EFZ, so I could only use two screws to attach it. The other end of the drive is just supported by the rubber grommets underneath it.

The previous drive that fit the pattern fine was a HGST 4TB Deskstar NAS.
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This is a problem with many if not most of the drives greater than 4TB. OWC makes modified drive trays for the old Mac Pros, so I had to get one of those the first time I exceeded 4TB.
 
I finally have all 9 of my drives. All drives have 83.H0A83 firmware and all model numbers are WDC WD80EFZX-68UW8N0

Thailand: March 26 2017
China: November 13 2016
China: April 5 2017
China: April 5 2017
China: April 5 2017
China: April 5 2017
China: April 5 2017
China: April 5 2017
China: April 5 2017

One of the China April 5 2017 drives appears to have a lot more vibration than the others.
 
Also, even when these 8TB RED drives are completely at idle, they "click" every 5 seconds. Has anyone else noticed this? You may not notice if your NAS has loud fans.
 
Most likely it's because the drive's head park timeout is 300 seconds (5 minutes). It should be configurable somehow in the firmware.
 
I have not noticed that. Although I only have 2 of them and I have no plans to remove them from the externals as long as I have a warranty.
 
Starrbuck said:
Most likely it's because the drive's head park timeout is 300 seconds (5 minutes). It should be configurable somehow in the firmware.
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When idling, all 9 drives click every 5 seconds (60 clicks in 5 minutes for each drive). This is apparently completely normal behavior (at least in all 9 of my drives).

It would be nice to know why they do this. It seems like extra wear and tear for some unknown reason. Maybe they re-calibrate every 5 seconds?
 
The clicking every 5 seconds is a feature:

"Preventive Wear Leveling". It's a periodic head sweep (Every 5 seconds for RED 8TB w/83.H0A83 firmware) to distribute lubricant and prevent wear in a particular place if lubricant were to build up in one spot.
 
I've got my 9 drives installed in my NAS and still have three 3.5" and three 2.5" SSD bays available. The QNAP TS-1635 is completely silent. All the noise comes from the drives inside.

nas.jpg
 
For $179 each, I'd have to be completely insane to return any of these 8TB RED due to Preventive Wear Leveling.

I believe the frequency will change as the drives ages. As I understand it, the preventive wear leveling maintains the lubricant in the head actuator bearing. It's breaking in the bearing when the drive is in idle.
 
I can't hear any clicking unless my head is right next to my case. Since that isn't going to be happening, and the fact that my server is in another room, I think I'll keep them...
 
DF-1 said:
So, the 5 seconds (that i mentioned in post #207) is because WD is now HGST. I made a thread about a month ago https://hardforum.com/threads/keep-getting-bad-hdds.1931970/ . I bought a WD black 6TB (the best preforming HDD) and it had those clicks, i returned it. got an 8TB HGST deskstar. same clicks.

I returned them both, won't be buying anymore HGST/WD.
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Many people are already afraid of Seagate. Scratching WD/HGST would make it a pretty short list.

Seriously though, WD needs to make it clear what this is. I can see reading various forums that people get a variety of answers from their support. No consistency is always a bad thing.
 
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Thanks for the easy shucking instructions. Had mine apart within a few minutes and installed. What a great deal, kinda sad I only bought one... Maybe it will come back around.
 
xrayos said:
I have 2 of these 8tb reds in my NAS box. Dunno if I should install the other 2 for RAID 5. Anyone think the prices will go lower?
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Storage prices always trend lower. It depends on when you're going to need them.

Need them in the next 6 months? I bet this price will be best.
After that probably not.
 
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