Synology NAS with WD Green; good/bad idea?

T

Thuleman

Supreme [H]ardness
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I have four 2 TB WD Greens that have been sitting around and I want to put them to use preferably in a NAS box (I don't want to build my own, I'll just buy a 4 or 8 disk Synology). Performance isn't an issue as this will be for backup archive storage only.

However, there seem to be conflicting opinions on whether WD Greens are a viable choice for a NAS as they power down completely (?) when not in use and that screws with the RAID set?
 
My boss has a couple of 1.5 TB WD Green drives in a RAID1 in his DS411+ and other than being slow they've been pretty stable. There are definitely some access speed issues due to the drive power-down that can make file manipulation on the drive do weird things, but using it as a backup spot should work fine.
 
The problems with Greens is the constant head parking. If you just run 1 backup a night it probably shouldn't be an issue. If you plan on using this as a daily file server I wouldn't use Greens.
 
You can use greens. There is a tool that can edit the drive firmware parameters and change the idle time before a head park is initiated. I've done that with my greens and turned them into reds. I don't have the longer warranty, but then again, I don't trust my data to a warranty replaced drive.
 
metril said:
. I've done that with my greens and turned them into reds.
Click to expand...

Nope, it's quite impossible to "turn them into reds" given one can't enable TLER on a Green drive and that's the big feature the Red drives bring to the party.
 
bigdogchris said:
The problems with Greens is the constant head parking. If you just run 1 backup a night it probably shouldn't be an issue. If you plan on using this as a daily file server I wouldn't use Greens.
Click to expand...

This.

Annoys the hell out of me.


And, FWIW I'm a bit pissed @ Synology. Mine makes so much fucking vibration sounds I'm ready to sell it. :mad:
 
You can turn the auto head park off, I did, and have five in my Synology.

That being said, it's a crapshoot, I've replaced 3 of the five in 18 months.

My advice is to use Red's which is what I'm slowly replacing the greens and seagate drives in mine with.
 
I know the Drobo's started out selling Greens in their pre-populated stuff when they first went big and had all sorts of reliability, permasleep, and speed issues. I suspect that it was partially due to using Greens. Use the right type drive for the job and you'll be good. FWIW, I've been ordering a bunch of NAS devices from SimplyNAS.com and have really good luck and they're free with info also. That last few times I've spoken with Pre-sales support, they're recommending Hitachi 3k/4k series over Seagate and WD for NAS duty.
 
I went with SE and RE and couldn't be more happy.
My 2 bad NAS still has 2 greens, but I rarely power that on now...
 
I have a 1512+ with 5 3tb wd reds and the machine is pretty rock stable and pretty good throughput. I had some pretty bad experiences with the 1.5 tb green/low power drives in the distant past from both wd and seagate so I personally try to avoid them. On a side note it is nice to see 1tb ssd's breaking the $400 price barrier hopefully a few iterations down the road they will either force mechanical tech to drop price or increase capacities. It sure would be nice to have 15tb ssd array for <$700.
 
ToddW2 said:
This.

Annoys the hell out of me.


And, FWIW I'm a bit pissed @ Synology. Mine makes so much fucking vibration sounds I'm ready to sell it. :mad:
Click to expand...

Which Synology do you have? The only time I've had vibration issues with one (and I have 4..from 2 bay up to 12 bay) was with my 1813+ full of 7200RPM drives and most of that was due to a faulty carrier.
 
Greens were never designed for raid which is standard for NAS.

Just go with the new HGST NAS drives and be set.

Besides the 5400 speeds they only have a 2 year warranty
 
Synologies are / should already be setup to handle WD green drives

eg

On one of my systems I have 4 old 2TB Greens 2 x EARS and 2 x EADS

have a look in the folder

/usr/syno/etc/rc.d

Code: 
MicroDS> ls -asl
   4 drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root          4096 Mar 16 00:33 .
   4 drwxr-xr-x   27 root     root          4096 Feb  6 23:43 ..
  12 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         10132 Jan  3  2014 S01iptables.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           423 Mar 16 00:41 S01iptables_nat.sh
   8 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          7586 Nov  6  2013 S01tc.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          1185 Nov  6  2013 S02bootup.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           551 Nov  6  2013 S02dbus.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          3521 Nov  6  2013 S02pppoerelay.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          2254 Nov  6  2013 S02synovpnclient.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           663 Nov  6  2013 S03hotplugd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          1970 Nov  6  2013 S03inetd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           467 Nov  6  2013 S04crond.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          1015 Nov  6  2013 S08snmpd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           868 Nov  6  2013 S09DDNS.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           579 Nov  6  2013 S10NatpmpPortmap.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           539 Nov  6  2013 S10UPnPportmap.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          2690 Nov  6  2013 S10slapd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          1240 Nov  6  2013 S11nslcd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          2105 Nov  6  2013 S12upsmon.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          2756 Nov  6  2013 S13synorelayd.sh
   8 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          4423 Nov  6  2013 S20pgsql.sh
  12 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          8193 Nov  6  2013 S21mysql.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           961 Nov  6  2013 S22syslogng.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          1765 Nov  6  2013 S23ntpd.sh
   8 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          4284 Nov  6  2013 S23synologd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           404 Nov  6  2013 S40irqbalance.sh
   8 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          6331 Nov  6  2013 S55cupsd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          1367 Nov  6  2013 S56gcpd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          1801 Nov  6  2013 S66S2S.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          2642 Nov  6  2013 S66fileindexd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          1600 Nov  6  2013 S66synoindexd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           894 Nov  6  2013 S77synomkthumbd.sh
  12 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          9006 Nov  6  2013 S78iscsitrg.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           512 Nov  6  2013 S79RCPower.sh
  16 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         12710 Nov  6  2013 S80samba.sh
   8 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          4173 Nov  6  2013 S81atalk.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          3823 Nov  6  2013 S83nfsd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          2439 Dec 16  2013 S84rsyncd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           541 Nov  6  2013 S85synonetbkpd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           863 Nov  6  2013 S88synomkflvd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          3084 Nov  6  2013 S90usbip.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           955 Dec 16  2013 S95sshd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          1002 Nov  6  2013 S96synosnmpcd.sh
  12 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         11178 Nov  6  2013 S97apache-sys.sh
  12 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          8212 Nov  6  2013 S97apache-user.sh
   8 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          6477 Nov  6  2013 S97apache-webdav.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           465 Nov  6  2013 S98findhostd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          1616 Nov  6  2013 S98ssdpd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           835 Nov  6  2013 S98upnpd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           632 Nov  6  2013 S99EAUpgrade.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           412 Nov  6  2013 S99WDidle3Dis.sh
  12 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          9084 Nov  6  2013 S99avahi.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           890 Nov  6  2013 S99ftpd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          2305 Nov  6  2013 S99sftpd.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          1110 Nov  6  2013 S99synomount.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           532 Nov  6  2013 S99synoreport.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           633 Nov  6  2013 S99synoscheduler.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          1732 Nov  6  2013 S99synostoraged.sh
   4 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          2060 Nov  6  2013 S99tftpd.sh
   8 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          5526 Nov  6  2013 S99zbootok.sh
   8 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          5102 Nov  6  2013 S99zupdateindexdb.sh

notice the file S99WDidle3Dis.sh

which contains the script

Code: 
# Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Synology Inc. All rights reserved.

case $1 in
        start)
                echo "We only disalbe WD idle3 timer when DS down, please call $0 stop"
        ;;
        stop)
                echo "Disabling WD idle3 timer ..."
                for d in `/usr/syno/bin/synodiskport -internal` `/usr/syno/bin/synodiskport -eunit`
                do
                        /usr/syno/bin/syno_disk_ctl --wd-idle -d /dev/$d
                done
                ;;
        *)
                echo "Usage: $0 start|stop"
        ;;
esac

So, it's automatically enabled (eg idle timer disabled) .....and only allowed to run when the system is put into sleep mode ......so that the HDD powers off / spins down correctly

I am guessing this should work the same for newer green drives?

.
 
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