this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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So I posted not too long ago that I had a drive failure in my RaidZ pool. Ordered a replacement disk (WD RED, purpose built for NAS), and tried resilvering only to see this after a short while...

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/10214 https://www.truenas.com/docs/hardware/notices/componentarticles/wdsmr/ https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/

Turns out WD started pushing out a new disk technology called SMR, that's slower, and fails when rebuilding RAIDs due to heavy write operations, and specifically marketed it towards NAS users? WTF Western Digital?!

Anyway, disk RMAd, and a replacement CMR disk is on the way. I'll never buy WD drives again... Lesson learned the hard way.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Always purchase WD Red Pro Drives. WD drives aren't bad, but their marketing is.

Oh, and Seagate isn't the best company either with all of their failures. From now on, just stick to WD Red Pro and Ironwolf

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Red plus drives should all be CMR as well

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you considered the Toshiba N300 range?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Anecdotal evidence of people not really liking them in terms of reliability; also I can't schuck them

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fair enough, I ask because nobody really mentions them but their backblaze stats seem good on a failure rate standpoint and they're fast since they run at the full 7200rpm where others don't. Though I have heard they're noisy (pun intended).

I've always felt shucking drives to be a bit risky personally, moreso now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If the price is $100 lower if I shuck them, then I will take the slightly inferior warranty.

I don't really like 7200 RPM drives, but I don't have a choice if I'm looking at bigger drives.

[–] LetMeThinkAboutIt 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It sucks, doesn’t it? When I saw that you bought WD Red, I was heading out to the comments to alert you of that. Try to return your order, buy Seagate IronWolf instead and remember to never buy WD again.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Daily reminder that Seagate drives have the highest failure rate and the lowest failure rate of any CMR drive and that WD drives have about 1/2 of the failure rate on average as Seagate drives: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/331241-backblaze-publishes-stats-for-hard-drive-failure-in-2021

In fact, almost all Ironwolf drives above 10 TB had ridiculous failure rates within the first year or two: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/hdds-typically-fail-in-under-3-years-backblaze-study-of-17155-drives-finds/

Both WD and Seagate are fine if you do your research into what models are good and bad. For example, get your hand on this Seagate Exos: ST8000NM000A or a WD Ultrastar WUH721816ALE6L4 and you apparently will have a 0% failure rate over 10 years lol.

No brand is overall great. There are great ironwolfs and shit ironwolfs that could fail in the first year. Just like there are shit WD reds (regular reds with shit SMR) and good WD reds (most plus/pros).

Brand loyalty is the stupidest investment a person can make.

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