BEWARE: WD Red Pro in desktop Use - Replacement suggestions?

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dpoverlord

[H]ard|Gawd
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Nov 18, 2004
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I did not think much of this but this is now the 7th WD Red Pro 4tb, 2tb and now 4th 8tb Western Digital Red Pro drive that has failed.

When I first purchased these WD had 24x7 Red Pro support and for me that was the deciding factor in buying this drive as I use this for my storage backups. It is not in a raid array or synology Nas setup as I frankly didn't have the patience to set this up.

The goal was max storage s I've manually just backed it up. Each time a drive has failed WD has replaced it. However, now that it has happened again, it is not worth the anxiety.

Warning: if you use these drives I've had failure throughout all of these years but this many failures... Contrary what the 'internet' will tell you, don't use these in non raid / Nas otherwise you will definitely run the risk of failure.

With that being said I'd love to replace and set up a raid mirror array where one drive is backing up the other and weaning off of all of my 4 8tb Red Pro drives.

Any drives you all recommend that may be faster, more reliable with as good of a warranty?

I read somewhere (may be stating this wrong fyi), that the issue with the red pro is that in windows the NAS drive is not able to fix its own errors when a bad sector is hit. Meanwhile in a non Red pro drive when a bad sector it gets re written and 'heals' itself.

Love any input please! Lots of love.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/...points-users-to-wd-red-pro-or-wd-gold.266101/
 
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I wonder if I dodged a bullet going with the Hitachi rebadges? I have the 6GB 6003FFBX (1.5TB/platter).
https://rml527.blogspot.com/2010/10/hdd-platter-database-western-digital-35_9883.html

Do you remember the model code on your 2TB and 4TB drives?

Otherwise my experience with WD drives - well anytime I heard clicking, I ran an advance RMA and have (knock on wood) so far pre-emptively avoided an event.
The one or two drives I got back usually had higher storage per platter than the original drive. But like I said, I heard clicking or saw noticeably slow performance (e.g. benchmarks showed single digit transfer rates in MB/s).
 
Mav451 said:
I wonder if I dodged a bullet going with the Hitachi rebadges? I have the 6GB 6003FFBX (1.5TB/platter).
https://rml527.blogspot.com/2010/10/hdd-platter-database-western-digital-35_9883.html

Do you remember the model code on your 2TB and 4TB drives?

Otherwise my experience with WD drives - well anytime I heard clicking, I ran an advance RMA and have (knock on wood) so far pre-emptively avoided an event.
The one or two drives I got back usually had higher storage per platter than the original drive. But like I said, I heard clicking or saw noticeably slow performance (e.g. benchmarks showed single digit transfer rates in MB/s).
Click to expand...
That's what I get on my WD Red drives.

On the phone with them now as the warranty replacement seems to be an SMR drive.
 
7 failures seems super unlucky, but I don't know, maybe you have hundreds of drives?
 
Luke M said:
7 failures seems super unlucky, but I don't know, maybe you have hundreds of drives?
Click to expand...
I don't think that this is a volume of drives situation given that there would likely be some sort of raid array involved. Which quite honestly should have been the solution from the get go for storage backup. All of the hassle and anxiety could have been avoided with a simple array and shows why going through some minor hassle in the beginning pays itself dividends later.

Anyway, given the information at hand, and assuming that it's a low volume situation, I'm inclined to think that the operating environment is an issue. I've had about a hundred hard drives in my lifetime and have only had 1 WD Raptor die on me, typically I've replaced them due to storage limits. I currently have a 500GB WD green drive that that is I think 12-13 years old with 42k hours on it performing fine in my daily driver.

Either way, stick with WD as it sounds like the service agreement is good in your situation.
 
It could also be vibration. I had a particular PC case which killed a desktop class drive every few months in my 6x drive RAID array. The WD Red Pro has firmware optimized for high drive counts in a single chassis, but you never know. The desktop drives will definitely fail fast if stacked in a chassis.
 
I've been running a pair of WD Red's for 2 and 4 years, as well as a pair of WD Blacks for 4 and 6 years. all four drives run 24/7 in my gaming PC.
My plex server was 3 12TB reds but those are only 8 months old.
Get some Blacks if you aren't running a NAS I guess.
 
Last time I had this number of drives fail was due to a faulty PSU. Problem ceased after replacing it. Bear this kind of thing if you continue to see failures post moving on from REDs.
 
Have you been using the same power supply for all of these drive failures?
 
dpoverlord said:
That's what I get on my WD Red drives.

On the phone with them now as the warranty replacement seems to be an SMR drive.
Click to expand...
Only the non-Pro Reds have shingled models (SMR), link. That's the reason I bought my Red Pros after the SMR controversy a year ago since by the end of 2019 the non-Pro Reds between 2-6TB had been replaced with the SMR variants.

If they've been providing SMR drives as replacements for the original CMR drive it may be the cause of the issues subsequently.
 
I'd be curious to know exactly what drive failure means in this case, as it's not clearly stated.

The OP also mentions that they just copy files manually, which is fine given certain situations. I personally use Microsoft's free utility synctoy. It's quite convenient and shockingly robust for freeware.
 
I have had four Seagate NAS drives fail on me in Raid 10. They failed one after the other, several months apart beggining at 6 months of operation. I rma'd each one. When the last one failed, out of warranty, I said enough is enough and bought four WD Pro drives to replace them. They better last because I really dont want to deal with that kind of nonsense again.

I think the best thing to do is buy drives from different batches and never rely on them for reliable storage. Which is why I need to setup Backblaze and just have it all go up to the cloud.
 
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