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Which HDD


Phileeny

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I have 15 HDDs in my server some Seagate most WD and I've been using both Drive Pool and Drive Bender, the other day one of my WD HDDs under Drive Bender went back to RAW (shown under windows drive manager) and Drive Bender began to have issues, I've got my data back from the RAW drive and I'm now moving more to Drive Pool and going to look in to "Scanner"

Most of my HDDs are 3TB WD Green, have I made a bad choice? What HDDs should I be getting?

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Hi I have 30 wd greens and all have been fine Reds were not available when I bought mine but many will surgest Reds are the way to go infact there are some new red pro's with 5year guarantee's I would say your fine and when if they do start to fail go for reds as there built for 24/7 use but if like me I have my server go to stanby when everybody is out greens should be fine.

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On the greens you need to run WDIDLE3 and set it to disabled or 5 minutes. Otherwise they are going to have too many Load Cycles (head parks). I have heard of this causing premature failure of these drives when used in a 24/7 environment. I have also heard of WD denying warranty when the rated number of load cycles has been exceeded.

 

Scanner or any SMART reader will tell you how many cycles the drive(s) have. I didn't know about this issue for almost a year, so I'm at over 143,000 load cycles on my green drive. Scanner keeps track of what the manufacturer rates these drives at, and Green drives are rated for 300,000 cycles. Reds are rated for 600,000 cycles.

 

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hacking-wd-greens-and-reds-with-wdidle3-exe.18171/

 

And so that Christopher doesn't have to say it, this is flashing your firmware so you do run some risk of losing the data on the drive, or even bricking your drive. I have not heard of anyone having issues with it though. 

 

When you find out how many load cycles you have, post it up. I'm curious.

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I have 15 HDDs in my server some Seagate most WD and I've been using both Drive Pool and Drive Bender, the other day one of my WD HDDs under Drive Bender went back to RAW (shown under windows drive manager) and Drive Bender began to have issues, I've got my data back from the RAW drive and I'm now moving more to Drive Pool and going to look in to "Scanner"

Most of my HDDs are 3TB WD Green, have I made a bad choice? What HDDs should I be getting?

 

Been there, done that. Never shell externals.... I had 6-7 of them go bad in a short period of time. Is what I get for going super cheap. :(

 

 

As the drive, I'm sorry to hear that, as that's never fun. However, I'm sure that it wasn't Drive Bender's fault... but because of how it works... recovering from that can be a PITA. (though, it's not fun regardless).

 

 

As for which drives, we recommend NAS drives for DrivePool. That's WD Reds, or Seagate NAS, or any other drives designed for NAS usage. They're pretty much ideal for DrivePool.

Though, Green drives to work. They do have problems, as mentioned (overly aggressive idling). 

 

 

As for the virus thing, you opened another forum thread about that, and I've responded there already. But I'm fairly certain that this is a false positive. :(

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Never shell externals.... I had 6-7 of them go bad in a short period of time. Is what I get for going super cheap. :(

 

I avoid giving advice based on a small sample size, but of 3 external drives I removed and put in my server, all 3 have failed within 2 years. Not a single failure from my other regular internal drives.  Maybe not a statistically valid sample size, but I agree with Drashna on this one.  

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I had ~10, I think. All but 4 have failed (well, 2 have completely failed, and the rest are starting to.. 1000+ damaged sectors and the same amount of "uncorrectable sector count" in SMART).

 

That, and even if it is just a fluke.... shelling the drives voids the warranty. So if anything does go wrong, you're SOL. 

And the most important stat on your drive may be the warranty period.

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