WD Sentinel DX4000

nutcase

nutcase

nutcase

Soldato
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18 Oct 2002
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SX, unfortunately
Has anyone else got one of these? We bought a 4x4TB one for work November 2013ish. It's currently failing one disk every couple of months. Whilst it has a 3 year warranty so the disks get replaced no quibble, it's a complete pain in the derriere. Temps are always in the green, but when you shut it down to take a failed disk out, it's too hot to touch! One day we'll lose a second disk and bang goes the array...

Anyone else had similar experience with these?
 
Failing one disk every couple of months? That is not right in the slightest!

Re. temperatures, I'm guessing you don't have it in an air-conditioned datacentre? My WD Red hard drives have a maximum temperature (the highest they've been) of 42C, although I suspect in the next couple of days the heatwave may push that a little bit higher. 42 isn't too hot to touch, but you would definitely feel it! Too hot to touch would be 55+ I would think, which seems far too high.
 
Ambient currently is quite warm at 25c - but still well within tolerance. Processors are showing ~50c.

I can't find when the first disk failed, but we've had on go in Feb, one April and now one overnight. It doesn't even do much, just sits there holding older data which is accessed once in a blue moon.

Just looked at home and my garage is showing 27c and that's still well within tolerance for the iLO I'm checking (cautions at an ambient of 42c!).
 
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Wow it gets better - WD don't have any drives and have asked how long we can survive without as they don't know when they're get any! Hmm, we're running RAID 5 on a 4x4TB array that's degraded - and we've been running that for a week now.

Place your bets how long til another one pops and we lose the array. Yes we have it backed up, but with nothing to restore to we're still in dire straits if/when it goes :(
 
Just buy a disk if it's your business at stake. How much would it cost you in lost productivity to not have access to the data for the 2 days it would take to get a new disk and restore the backup? How much does a new disk cost?
 
Would love to - price is about £235 but there is no stock anywhere :(

For the moment I've lent work a small NAS to cover.
 
I've just been looking at the list of compatible disks here.

The only that shows on order with two of our trade distributors is this one : WDBNSW0040HNC-WESN but ETA is 3 to 4 weeks.

However, if you look at the kit contents, a number of the 4TB drives start WD4000F9YZ which are common WD 4TB SE and widely in stock.
 
Yup, but unfortunately they have the wrong firmware (09N20L1 instead of 09N20L0) so they don't work :( OCUK have 4 of them and they're no good for us :(

WD are still saying no stock (we even asked if they could re-flash the firmware on one!) and don't know what to do. If they can't repair and they can't replace - the new ones don't seem to have Windows storage server but have their own software instead, then I want it refunded.
 
I know it seems a bit Captain Hindsight, but when people get upset at the cost of enterprise storage arrays and the maintenance contracts on top, I'm going to point them at this thread.
 
You're absolutely right - I've learned a lot since we bought this.

The depressing this is - the drives in it are sold as enterprise class (albeit SATA of course)! And yet we're getting repeat failures and the drive manufacturer can't keep up with demand for replacements.

The box was bought as a disk to disk to tape solution - which it is, but it's also evolved into an archive for the older data that needs to be available for ocassional use. Not what I originally intended!
 
Getting somewhere. WD have said they'll offer a refund on the failed drive (not sure how they'd value that as it came with the unit - and no use to us anyway because of the lack of replacements) or a refund on the whole unit. Awaiting permission from the powers that be, but my recommendation is to jump on the refund for the unit, and then buy a microserver with server 2012 and a bunch of NAS drives and build our own.
 
Hopefully you had a backup. WDs complete lack of understanding of why it's important if you sell these sorts of products to be able to support them is astounding.
 
Of course :) Well, we will have to download the ISOs from VLSC again but that's it. We've had the data required to be shared on another NAS for a little while (one from home!) but were letting it run to see what happened.
 
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