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WD Red drives?

Aesma said:
The black is a sports car. When you need to bring your 5 kids to school, it's useless. If the OS and programs are on an SSD (aka a formula one), then the hard drive is for storage, and the red should be perfect.
Click to expand...
I've never had an SSD yet but, my build has been ordered (i7) so, I'm just hoping the black sports car will be fine for my set-up with the SSD for OS & programs and the Black 1T for data, storage etc. I'll have the Mushkin DX 240g.

I really got the black for its 5-year warranty. I'm surprised that the red doesn't come with a 5 year warranty.
 
balance101 said:
hmm so TLER is only good for HARDWARD raid?

thanks for saving me money :p dong ZFS
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Again I'm no fan of WD and their business practices, but to play devil's advocate for a sec, TLER is only a small part of the differences from, say, a WD green or blue here. There's also the 1 million hour rated MTBF which is about 1/3 higher than most desktop class drives and puts it much closer to the 1.2M hour MTBF of the enterprise RE4's, there's the 10^14 BER which is well beyond consumer class drives, and lastly, going with cheaper consumer class or "Eco" marketed drives you're potentially dealing with excessive cycling/load counts/head parking due to APM which some vendors don't even provide the tools to disable.

Also, just because someone on a forum said "ZFS doesn't need TLER" doesn't mean ZFS wouldn't also stand to benefit from it. It only means ZFS is more tolerant to long recovery cycles by incorporating a longer default timeout than what's typically found on hardware raid cards. So there's no right or wrong answer on TLER for ZFS - it comes down to individual preference, and personally I'd rather a drive kicked out sooner with a shortened error recovery timeout because on modern drives I see it as a sign of potentially bigger problems with the drive anyway due to how infrequently it happens these days. In other words even a single long recovery cycle means I'm yanking the drive and full-scanning to make sure nothing else is going on and determining if I shouldn't just be RMA'ing the drive.

So bottom line, the $10 increase over the MSRP of a green you're getting 33% more warranty besides just what seems like a better drive especially in scenarios that require them configured in multiples and benefit from having APM disabled.
 
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JoseJones said:
I really got the black for its 5-year warranty. I'm surprised that the red doesn't come with a 5 year warranty.
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Not surprising at all since a 5-yr Red would cannibalize Black sales. More to do with marketing & politics than estimated lifespan. Granted, by all indications these drives all share a common "platform" & componentry (much in the way the car industry works) due to the enormous cost of spinning up an entirely separate platform, but based on WD's track record its strategic marketing. And some of the invisible lines the fratboy marketing majors have tried to draw between product lines over the years haven't always been in touch with "the situation on the ground" nor has it stopped people from using certain cheaper drives for scenarios WD hadn't wanted.

Notice how WD is careful to say "Red is for 1-5 drive NAS scenarios" and then intentionally didn't include the hardware raid vendors in the pre-release sampling & compatibility testing. Were they actually worried the Reds wouldn't be compatible with raid controllers? Hell no, just the opposite - they would have been "too" compatible and so didn't want to draw attention to the fact. It's the invisible lines thing again trying not to cannibalize enterprise class sales and its superior margins. The Reds were intended as a "Green for the drobo crowd" by all indications, but the firmware tweaks that NAS's benefit from just so happen align perfectly with what hardware & software raid likes. Nothing profound here that hasn't already been said 100x but something to keep in mind.
 
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What's the story with head parking on these drives? I am concerned because the Red looks allot like a modified WD Green.

Is there anything definitive coming out of Western Digital?
 
So, from results of test of Storage Review,
=> http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_caviar_black_review_2tb
=> http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_red_nas_hard_drive_review_wd30efrx

... I made these charts :

oimg
oimg


oimg
oimg


Cheers.

St3F
 
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BETA. said:
from what I gather, the caviar black would be a better performance wise. it looks like people are getting wet over the reds for raid setups catered for storage.
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This is good to know, I was just wondering the same thing. Right now I have 1TB blacks in my raid array and I've been debating on buying more as I'll need expansion soon. I have room for a couple more drives before the server is full. By that time it will be time for a whole new box as it's on it's last legs.
 
You won't have broken RAID arrays, which is common with Windows-based FakeRAID arrays.
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There is no such thing as a "Windows-based FakeRAID array".
FakeRAID, aka motherboard RAID, is controller and driver based, it has little to do with an OS.
Windows uses Windows software RAID, which you are correct, will have broken RAID arrays; it's terrible imo.

FakeRAID /= software RAID
Just fyi, in case you didn't know. ;)
 
kristof said:
TLER is desirable for Linux software raid.

http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-raid/2010/3/24/6883503
Click to expand...

Desirable, yes.
Required, no.

After using WD Green drives with no TLER support in MDADM for over 1.5 years now, I've only ever had one drive drop due to a bad SATA cable connector.
I have incurred errors, which the drives themselves hung on, but MDADM took over soon after and was able to continue without losing any of the drives.

TLER would be a minor improvement at best, and honestly, if it isn't in a many-user situation, I wouldn't even consider it.

TLER really shows true advantages with FakeRAID and hardware RAID where they are not only desirable, but necessary to avoid data/drive loss.
 
Red Falcon said:
Desirable, yes.
Required, no.

After using WD Green drives with no TLER support in MDADM for over 1.5 years now, I've only ever had one drive drop due to a bad SATA cable connector.
I have incurred errors, which the drives themselves hung on, but MDADM took over soon after and was able to continue without losing any of the drives.

TLER would be a minor improvement at best, and honestly, if it isn't in a many-user situation, I wouldn't even consider it.

TLER really shows true advantages with FakeRAID and hardware RAID where they are not only desirable, but necessary to avoid data/drive loss.
Click to expand...
+1 MDADM & Raid5 since May 2009 with 5x 1 To WD Green, no WDidled, not aligned 4k ... still on the road without any error!
SAS 15k -> Raid5 MDADM (less than 1 TB free on 4 TB) @ 76 Mo/s with Gigabit and file > 1,4 GB.

Cheers.

St3F
 
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kristof said:
That pic has me reconsidering my decision to wait until Amazon stocks these. My multi-disk Newegg orders have always been packed like this:
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Neb said:
That's been my experience as well in the past, which is why I moved to Amazon. If more people are receiving their drives like that I might go back and try ordering from Newegg.
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I live in TN, so 99% of my orders come out of the Newegg Memphis Warehouse.
My packages always some really well packed and well protected.

These were wrapped in 4 layers of bubble wrap, all drives inside the Styrofoam shell.

I have noticed that most of the "bad" packing comes out of NJ or CA, but not to say it can't happen anywhere, just never happened to me and Memphis.

Back on Topic ...

I need to find some program to test each drive with before I build this 14TB Raid 5 Array.

Any suggestions ?
 
EvilAlchemist said:
I live in TN, so 99% of my orders come out of the Newegg Memphis Warehouse.
My packages always some really well packed and well protected.

These were wrapped in 4 layers of bubble wrap, all drives inside the Styrofoam shell.

I have noticed that most of the "bad" packing comes out of NJ or CA, but not to say it can't happen anywhere, just never happened to me and Memphis.
Click to expand...

Makes sense. I get 50% of my newegg shipments from NJ and 50% from TN. I better not risk it.
 
Well now this looks nice. Time to replace my 5 HD204UI's (samsung) with 6 3TB Red's but only after seeing how stable these are. Because my 204UI's have zero smart errors and have been running for one year 24/7 without a damn hitch. ANd yes they will be for sale cha cha
 
Well glad to see drives that hopefully work ok with hardwar raid controllers.

Prices still have not came down man. I bought my 30x3 TB last year for $109 each. How is it prices are still this high. Makes me sad for everyone else but glad I got drives when I did.
 
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Testing is complete on my 8x Red drives I ordered.
One was DOA, One failed SMART Tests.
The Other 6 passed SMART and Extended Drive Tests.

I am going to setup a temporary Raid 5 with the 6x drive I have left for more testing so we can get some of the RAID questions answered.
 
TLER and balancing make these very tempting although OEM 4TB 5K3000s are still available here in the UK.

Are these drives going to replace the RE4-GPs?
 
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EvilAlchemist said:
Testing is complete on my 8x Red drives I ordered.
One was DOA, One failed SMART Tests.
The Other 6 passed SMART and Extended Drive Tests.

I am going to setup a temporary Raid 5 with the 6x drive I have left for more testing so we can get some of the RAID questions answered.
Click to expand...

Are you on hardware or software raid?
 
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.
 
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...

Any chance you and EvilAlchemist can compare serials to see if your bad drives might be from the same batch?
 
Not a good sign at all, kids. Two people posting within a few hours of each other that 25% of their drives were less than perfect - which is kinda what you hope for when paying $180+ for a 3TB these days, nevermind Amazon had a Seagate 3TB external on offer last week for half the price and makes it almost disposable at that pricepoint. In fairness we don't know how much mishandling actually happens at Newegg, or really what mishandling may have happened at all points between when it passed testing at the end of the assembly line and when it finally got to your door.

I do know that every drive I ever received that was defective on arrival just happened to be from Newegg and were always drives out of the OEM 20-packs they get from the factory, just like they're doing with the Reds here. It happened enough times even with Hitachi's that I quickly standardized on only buying retail boxed ones since they're a lot more tolerant to handling abuse along the way. And after 200 purchases of the retail boxed Hitachi's never a single bad one. Hardly a scientific study but has made me wonder about Newegg especially since it mirrors the accounts of many others.
 
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kristof said:
Any chance you and EvilAlchemist can compare serials to see if your bad drives might be from the same batch?
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As much as I'd love to be wrong this doesn't smell like manufacturing errors related to specific batches.
 
odditory said:
As much as I'd love to be wrong this doesn't smell like manufacturing errors related to specific batches.
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I'm confused. Are you saying that you believe it to be mishandling after production, or production problems that affect multiple (possibly all) batchs?

I personally stopped buying disks from Newegg years ago because of ridiculously high failure rates. I know odditory knows this but some newbies may not: Not all deaths due to mishandling are DOA's. Some mishandled disks work fine for months but die early due to mishandling during shipment.
 
I'm saying I'm giving WD benefit of the doubt that its not manufacturing errors (remember every drive is fully tested when its born) -- its statistically unlikely based on the percentage of drives these guys received that were bad. Newegg is the common denominator here and they have a longtime tradition of not being able to break up the 20-packs from the factory, repackage them into individual shipments and actually get them into customers' hands trouble-free with any consistency. More perplexing is enough people receive bare drives that *do* look adequately packed yet then are knocking/clicking or grinding with crashed heads as soon as power is applied, to make you really wonder WTF? Broom hockey in the warehouse? Robotic pickers not calibrated properly for delicate items? FWIW, this seems to happen much, much less on the retail boxed drives suspended by clamshell brackets.

And you're absolutely right about drives dying a delayed death being often rooted in earlier stresses. That's why you do the several weeks of burn-in and disk thrashing within the 30-day return window because it'll tend to reveal the weaker drives prone to earlier failure. Its been extremely rare that I have a drive survive that burn-in but then fail say 6 months down the line.
 
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kristof said:
Any chance you and EvilAlchemist can compare serials to see if your bad drives might be from the same batch?
Click to expand...

Drive #1 = S/N WMC300005266 --> Will not power on, DOA
Drive #2 = S/N WMC3000510169 --> Fails SMART Drive Tests (Tested using Western Digital's Lifeguard Diagnostics)

My two drives are very apart in terms of serial ##s.

There will always be a shipping death or factory defect or other issues.
Some of you jump the gun way to fast and place blame.

Just to recap, I do have six great drives I am testing.
 
WD Red drives are failing, not a good sign.
Like I said, WD has gone to crap, these drives are not revitalizing my trust in them.

Too bad, I was really hoping these drives would be reliable, considering their cost and their nature.
 
Red Falcon said:
WD Red drives are failing, not a good sign.
Like I said, WD has gone to crap, these drives are not revitalizing my trust in them.

Too bad, I was really hoping these drives would be reliable, considering their cost and their nature.
Click to expand...

Every hd manufacture has doa issues. These forums, amazon and Newegg prove that
 
EvilAlchemist said:
Every hd manufacture has doa issues. These forums, amazon and Newegg prove that
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True, but WD's failure rates have skyrocketed since 2010.
Their Green and Black drives have the same failure rates that HP laptops have.

It's really unfortunate because I used to be a huge fan of WD up to that point.
I'll be sticking with Seagate from here on out.
 
odditory said:
In fairness we don't know how much mishandling actually happens at Newegg, or really what mishandling may have happened at all points between when it passed testing at the end of the assembly line and when it finally got to your door.
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I worked for one of the big shipping companies for a couple of weeks. The one that uses big trucks that are kinda brownish.

If you can get these things shipped to you with a less than 95% failure rate, then you have just experienced an honest-to-God miracle.

Opened my eyes quite a bit... and now I'm terrified of ordering any kind of electronics online. Clothes and protein powder are all good. Electronics... not so much.
 
EvilAlchemist said:
Drive #1 = S/N WMC300005266 --> Will not power on, DOA
Drive #2 = S/N WMC3000510169 --> Fails SMART Drive Tests (Tested using Western Digital's Lifeguard Diagnostics)

My two drives are very apart in terms of serial ##s.

There will always be a shipping death or factory defect or other issues.
Some of you jump the gun way to fast and place blame.

Just to recap, I do have six great drives I am testing.
Click to expand...

I'll get the numbers next week when I go in.
 
Red Falcon said:
True, but WD's failure rates have skyrocketed since 2010.
Their Green and Black drives have the same failure rates that HP laptops have.

It's really unfortunate because I used to be a huge fan of WD up to that point.
I'll be sticking with Seagate from here on out.
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How is Seagate these days anyway? I've been avoiding them since the 1.5TB drives that had a 90% chance of failure. I had also found that seagates did not perform well in raid, they just did not seem to have the speed, though that's kinda moot as it may have simply been the model I was using.

Seagate seems to be cheaper than WD, so it's tempting when it comes to building large arrays.
 
Red Squirrel said:
How is Seagate these days anyway? I've been avoiding them since the 1.5TB drives that had a 90% chance of failure. I had also found that seagates did not perform well in raid, they just did not seem to have the speed, though that's kinda moot as it may have simply been the model I was using.

Seagate seems to be cheaper than WD, so it's tempting when it comes to building large arrays.
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Seagate has been more reliable than WD for some time, at least in the desktop-class market.
Their enterprise-grade has always been top-notch.

It saddens me to see WD take such a fall, but after all of their failures with Green, Black, and hopefully not Red, drives, I won't be touching them with a ten-foot pole any time soon.

Fairly recently, I purchased four Seagate Barracudas (see sig) for RAID 0, none have failed as of yet and have been running like champs.
 
Red Falcon said:
Seagate has been more reliable than WD for some time, at least in the desktop-class market.
Their enterprise-grade has always been top-notch.

It saddens me to see WD take such a fall, but after all of their failures with Green, Black, and hopefully not Red, drives, I won't be touching them with a ten-foot pole any time soon.

Fairly recently, I purchased four Seagate Barracudas (see sig) for RAID 0, none have failed as of yet and have been running like champs.
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I'm 2 years in with my 10 drive WD20EADS array. No failures (TLER is enabled), good performance and reasonanble power consumption. I'm on Adaptec 52245 Hardware raid despite people saying these drives and hardware raid is a no go; maybe I've just been lucky or got drives before WD went down hill.

I'm actually seriously considering the Reds or Seagate Constellation SAS for my next array; the 1 year warranty on the Hitachis (Only seems to be OEM available here) make them too risky.
 
I'm 2 years in with my 10 drive WD20EADS array. No failures (TLER is enabled), good performance and reasonanble power consumption. I'm on Adaptec 52245 Hardware raid despite people saying these drives and hardware raid is a no go; maybe I've just been lucky or got drives before WD went down hill.
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When were your WD20EADS HDDs manufactured?
Also, look at the newegg reviews: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136344

Almost all of them are saying "highly unreliable", which just echos what I was saying earlier.
Also, those drives are desktop-class and do not feature TLER, so really, you are running a huge risk pushing those things in a hardware RAID array.

I'm glad its worked so long for you and hope it continues to do so.
But damn, you are running a huge risk.

I'm actually seriously considering the Reds or Seagate Constellation SAS for my next array
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Go with the Constellation drives, they are true nearline-class drives and are far more reliable in, and are designed for, hardware RAID.
I just ordered two Constellation ES HDDs for myself about 30 minutes ago for my server.

The Red drives, while they do have RAFF-like functionality and TLER, they are still just a desktop-class drive and do not have the robustness or full features like that of nearline-class drives.
Remember, high-performance /= reliability.
 
Red Falcon said:
Go with the Constellation drives, they are true nearline-class drives and are far more reliable in, and are designed for, hardware RAID.
I just ordered two Constellation ES HDDs for myself about 30 minutes ago for my server.

The Red drives, while they do have RAFF-like functionality and TLER, they are still just a desktop-class drive and do not have the robustness or full features like that of nearline-class drives. Remember, high-performance /= reliability.
Click to expand...

If we're talking about for a business setting and youre spending someone else's money, sure, get enterprise class. But a lot of people on this forum are tending to just store media at home and I'd say you're better off buying two desktop class drives for the same price as what the ES drives are going for. Having two physically separate copies of the data on two cheaper disks > 1 enterprise drive with no backup at the same pricepoint. And again, for home storage where uptime is less of a factor.
 
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