Are NAS drives actually better? Another WD Red failure.

Randall8686 · 13 Apr 2020 at 09:17

I have a fairly big (12 drive) unraid server. When I first built the server many years ago I used a mix of drives and as drives have failed I have replaced and grown it with WD red drives. 2 days ago I had my third WD Red total failure the drive was 5 years old my previous red failures are again 5 and 7 years old.

It got me looking at some of the very old drives still in the system. Well the longest standing drives are seagate with the oldest being a “seagate Samsung spinpoint” that is about 10 years old and still showing zero signs of failure. They are both not nas drives. My disks are spun up 24/7 as the server is accesses many times a day so it got me thinking are NAS drives actually all that? From my obviously very limited exposure to drive failures the ones that have failed on me the most are the ones “designed” for the task.

what is others experience in this?

FreeStream · 13 Apr 2020 at 13:07

Statistically irrelevant I’m afraid.

Had a load of WD Reds before going to shucked elements, none died.

Not had a drive actually die on me in years. Had the odd SMART error due to power/controller/cable issues though.

Long story short is any drive can die at any time (although see the bathtub curve), usage plays a part as well as environment.

Was running about 16 drives of various sizes/types until late last year when I reconfigured my storage setup.

8x4TB in my UnRAID server went to 4x10TB.
Off lines went from 2+3 and 2+6 to 2x8TB..

Less drives you have lower chances of failure..!

Scythe · 13 Apr 2020 at 17:31

I've had two WD Reds start to fail last week, about two weeks out of warranty. Cut me losses and converted to Seagate Ironwolf. The drives are significantly quieter than my WD reds were and seem faster already.

Randall8686 · 14 Apr 2020 at 10:27

Scythe said:
I've had two WD Reds start to fail last week, about two weeks out of warranty. Cut me losses and converted to Seagate Ironwolf. The drives are significantly quieter than my WD reds were and seem faster already.

to be honest i dont care for noise or speed as they are in a server well out the way and the speed of the drives can saturate gigabit Ethernet so i wont gain anything. but it has made me order another drive too have two parity drive's. although the most important data is backed up into Gdrive i have too much data to store it all off site so although its not the end of the world if it goes i would much prefer not to loose all my RAW files. But i have about 15TB of video files from my cameras

Mark1989 · 22 Apr 2020 at 06:20

My bad had a WD black in it, it did fail on its 5th year but WD replaced it so happy days.

When I used to work at a competitor company amount of WD red drives I saw fail/returned was much higher than WD other drives safe to say I'd never touch one

Undesirable · 22 Apr 2020 at 14:30

I'm switching to Seagate if planned obsolescence rears its ugly head with my WD Reds.

ubersonic · 22 Apr 2020 at 14:40

Mark1989 said:
When I used to work at a competitor company amount of WD red drives I saw fail/returned was much higher than WD other drives

That's to be expected though. A red should be more likely to see a return than a black/blue/green/gold. The reason is very simple, the blue/black/green drives were/are not designed/intended for 24/7 use and in the case of the blue/green the warranty is shorter than the reds. The end result is that even if a red is a more robust drive than a blue/black/green it's still more likely to fail in warranty as the other drives will (on average) only see <1/3 the use over the same time frame and (excluding the black) their warranty will end sooner.

The difference maker is the gold drives (former RE), which are designed/built for 24/7 operation however to a higher standard than the reds and marketed/priced as such. They will be statistically less likely to fail than a red due to being a better drive.

Bonus fact: The original first generation WD Red drives were literally just WD greens with a longer warranty and higher price, WD saw that people were buying their green drives to use in these new fangled "NAS" devices and saw a hole in the market they could fill (later generations were tuned for the use ofc).