Western Digital Red NAS hard drives

[bribrius]

happy you like it trevor. I went through my time with this, boot discs, manually flashing bios. Recovery disks (and diskettes old days). honestly I pretty much hate data and avoid these types of things now. its sucked too many hours out of my life dealing with computers (I used to fix other peoples too for side money). why my last laptops went out in the driveway and I ran them over with my truck. im outdated and not even fourty. older I get, the more I just don't want to deal with it. sorry I couldn't be a bigger help. if its small info, stack up some usb drives maybe. I wouldn't rely on them either though.

 

[KmH]

Are you sure your Drobo 5N is getting sufficient air flow for cooling?

 

[bribrius]

Are you sure your Drobo 5N is getting sufficient air flow for cooling?

everything is way to hi-tech for such a issue now. :mrgreen: (did I mention a computer overheating the other day because there was stuff stuck in the fan so it wasn't spinning and the owner couldn't figure out why it was overheating?)

 

[Trever1t]

Are you sure your Drobo 5N is getting sufficient air flow for cooling?

It's on the floor under my workstation and doesn't get hot or make a lot of fan noise.

 

[bribrius]

tape backup if must be. don't count on raid. again. two cents. putting all your data in one place, is not a backup.

 

[Trever1t]

5 places with dual disc redundancy but yeah, I get it. Backing up now to 2x 2T externals.

 

[IByte]

I bought a Drobo 5N NAS in January and since then I've experienced 2 drive failures with the WD RED drives. WD RMA policy is cool, they ship me out a new drive and allow me to return the dead one without charge (A reconditioned unit, shipping not included) but what a PITA. 2 out of 5 drives in 2 months? The RED drives have a 3 year replacement warranty and I have enabled dual disc redundancy on the NAS so short of losing 3 drives at the same time I'm ok but dayum!!!

<img src="http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=70036"/>

Is there a better drive? Is this normal?

http://www.synology.com/en-us/

Here you Trevor good child.

 

[Rgollar]

I have 6 3 tb red western digital drives in my readynas pro for the last year and have had no problems yet. But I will say when I copy files to my nas it hangs up for 10 seconds sometimes before it copies. I am not overly impressed with these drive my self.

 

[JerryLove]

Hit NewEgg's reviews on the WD Reds... Crib death is a *really* common problem (at least at 3TB and 4TB). They look reasonably reliable if they survive the first few months.

I'm a long-time WD fan. Been using them almost exclusively since Seagate bought Maxtor and ended the excellent MaxLine prosumer drives (actually, was using WD since back in the Piranha 200MB drive days, but moved to the MaxLine when I discovered it (300GB days))... but I think the new 12TB array is going to be Hitachi. WD Red DOA , based on NewEgg feedback, seems around 50%.

 

[cheshirecat79]

tape backup if must be. don't count on raid. again. two cents. putting all your data in one place, is not a backup.

Tape isn't really feasible for home use. RAID can be counted on for redundancy. You're dead on correct about having copies of the data available in another physical location.

 

[cheshirecat79]

I have 6 3 tb red western digital drives in my readynas pro for the last year and have had no problems yet. But I will say when I copy files to my nas it hangs up for 10 seconds sometimes before it copies. I am not overly impressed with these drive my self.

The 10 second delay is most likely the drives spooling up after being in a "sleep" state. You can change this setting in the ReadyNAS software- look for "drive spin down" in the power management settings. You may need to update the firmware to obtain this functionality.

 

[TinySquid]

Hit NewEgg's reviews on the WD Reds... Crib death is a *really* common problem (at least at 3TB and 4TB). They look reasonably reliable if they survive the first few months.

Basically this. The WD Reds can be good drives if you're on a budget and are willing to not fully rely on the array for several months (not that you should be fully relying on an array for long term backup anyway...), but they're not really my cup of tea. I usually recommend the WD RE4 drives for NAS/fileserver RAID use depending on the specific application--they've proven to be pretty reliable in high demand applications and are covered by a 5 year warranty.

That said, I did cheap out on my own fileserver setup and ended up using an old LSI RAID card I salvaged from a server pared with four Hitachi (HGST) 2TB 7K3000 drives. They've been running fine for the past two years and the array is backed up automatically through Carbonite, so I'm not horribly worried about drives tanking.

 

[JerryLove]

tape backup if must be. don't count on raid. again. two cents. putting all your data in one place, is not a backup.

Tape isn't really feasible for home use. RAID can be counted on for redundancy. You're dead on correct about having copies of the data available in another physical location.

Everyone has their own definition of feasible.

RAID is a way to reduce the chance of failure. Backup is a way to recover from failure. They are actually rather different concepts.

I use CrashPlan. I use it two ways. I use the application to backup from my devices to a NAS at my parent's house (similarly, they backup to storage space at my house). I also back up to CrashPlan's online storage (which is unlimited, though upload speeds can be bad).

 

[JerryLove]

That said, I did cheap out on my own fileserver setup and ended up using an old LSI RAID card I salvaged from a server pared with four Hitachi (HGST) 2TB 7K3000 drives. They've been running fine for the past two years and the array is backed up automatically through Carbonite, so I'm not horribly worried about drives tanking.

Believe it or not: I actually prefer software RAID for home storage (obviously: high usage storage, as I deal with in my working life, is a different story). The reason is that, should you LSI card fail, you may not be able to find hardware that would let you remount (assuming you are RAID 5 or RAID 0 (or variations thereof, rarely is this a problem with RAID 1). With software RAID, you can simply install the same software on new hardware and remount.

That said: I miss SBSs heterogeneous RAID configurations, and am honestly surprised no one sells a software RAID solution with that for home computers.

 

[NjStacker22]

tape backup if must be. don't count on raid. again. two cents. putting all your data in one place, is not a backup.

Tape isn't really feasible for home use. RAID can be counted on for redundancy. You're dead on correct about having copies of the data available in another physical location.

Everyone has their own definition of feasible.

RAID is a way to reduce the chance of failure. Backup is a way to recover from failure. They are actually rather different concepts.

I use CrashPlan. I use it two ways. I use the application to backup from my devices to a NAS at my parent's house (similarly, they backup to storage space at my house). I also back up to CrashPlan's online storage (which is unlimited, though upload speeds can be bad).

Can you explain to me how raid reduces your chance of failure? *honest question* I just had a friend build me a computer (AMD quad core, 16gb ram, USB 3.0, etc.) and I ended up using one of my old hard-drives plus another I had laying around (both 1TB WD's) just to get the computer done because it sucked up more money than I had anticipated. Anyway, with 2 weeks one of the drives failed :/ I have the RAID setup just to have a carbon copy of my first drive; in case anything ever went wrong. And in this case; it's served it's purpose in perfect timing. For the record I also have another 1tb HD in the case that I use for back up storage. I know that I need 3 new hard-drives (probably going to do 3x2 for the raid and a 3tb for the backup) but I'm starting to think I'm doing this wrong.