2011-08-21, 18:43
Looking through many online reviews for WD Green 2tb drives I see a lot of negative reviews. Should I be worried about sticking 5 of these in my NAS? Does anyone recommend these drives or should I go with something else?
Quartermass Wrote:Don't believe any end users who favour one brand over another for reliability. Nobody has access to those figures so all we can tell is by using far too small sample sizes - e.g. I've got 5 drives and no problems, or I've got 1 drive and it failed.
There's two things you need to know about drives for RAID.
First of all those WD green drives have a firmware which will constantly park the heads, this will mean that the drive may have a higher chance of failure later. You might want to disable that (I don't have a link handy) with the tool from WD.
Secondly WD drives don't allow you to enable the TLER feature, which can help preserve a drive in a RAID array when it meets an error, rather than having it drop out. It's not a big deal, however if I was going to go 5 drives in a NAS I'd pick drives where I could enable it.
Quartermass Wrote:Don't believe any end users who favour one brand over another for reliability. Nobody has access to those figures so all we can tell is by using far too small sample sizes - e.g. I've got 5 drives and no problems, or I've got 1 drive and it failed.All good points but kind of irrelevant to the OP's situation. If he is using unraid on his NAS then he need not worry about the TLER issue and, like you said, the head parking issue (which I believe would impact any linux based server) can be disabled. But I do agree that there is not much difference between all the major HDD OEMs and the online reviews can sometimes be misleading. So get whatever drive you want just don't buy them all at the same time from the same supplier. If you do and that lot has a defect/problem then all your drives could fail at about the same time.
There's two things you need to know about drives for RAID.
First of all those WD green drives have a firmware which will constantly park the heads, this will mean that the drive may have a higher chance of failure later. You might want to disable that (I don't have a link handy) with the tool from WD.
Secondly WD drives don't allow you to enable the TLER feature, which can help preserve a drive in a RAID array when it meets an error, rather than having it drop out. It's not a big deal, however if I was going to go 5 drives in a NAS I'd pick drives where I could enable it.
eskro Wrote:i suggest you read poofyhairguy's [unRAID] recommandations...I'm sure this will be controversial but what the hell...
as far as i know,
he tried almost all consumer 2TB drives on the market
and he gives use his order of preference....
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=94268
wsume99 Wrote:I'm sure this will be controversial but what the hell...
By no means am I doubting poofy's knowledge, but he is just one person. I don't know what the yearly global production numbers are on HDDs but I'm sure it's really big. So should we decide how to purchase hardware based on a single person's recommendation? How likely is it that his experiences with the few drives that he has purchased are representative of the total worldwide population of HDDs? It's nice to hear what others have experienced but you have to be careful to not go too far.
wsume99 Wrote:By no means am I doubting poofy's knowledge, but he is just one person. I don't know what the yearly global production numbers are on HDDs but I'm sure it's really big. So should we decide how to purchase hardware based on a single person's recommendation? How likely is it that his experiences with the few drives that he has purchased are representative of the total worldwide population of HDDs? It's nice to hear what others have experienced but you have to be careful to not go too far.