Hard Drive Recommendation

[FatherLandDescendant]

So I got a 3TB WD Blue

I have 4 WD blue label all 3TB in a TS-431+ and have never had a problem with them and they run around 95/96F according to the on-board monitoring, and they are quiet I've never heard them spin up or down like I use to when I had black labels in there.

 

[RMerlin]

I do wonder if the firmware looks for a "compatible" drive and has an issue if it does not see one. As it is now, only Seagate NAS drives are listed.

I have a few QNAPs deployed for customers with Blue WDs (those date to before the Red appeared on the market). I highly doubt they use any whitelist, and I see no technical reason for the Blue to not work.

 

[grifo]

I agree with what you say, and it's why I went with the WD Blue. I asked the "pros" in the Qnap forum about TLER and am curious what their opinion is. Anyhow the NAS is working correctly.

I do wonder if the firmware looks for a "compatible" drive and has an issue if it does not see one. As it is now, only Seagate NAS drives are listed.

Thanks

Did they answer your question? I'm also considering getting a TS-128A and would prefer using a WD Blue for the reasons Eric and yourself wrote, though I wouldn't have a way to format it outside of the NAS, so if doesn't recognize it like in your case I'd be stuck.

Is it possible to format it from the NAS via ssh? Eric, perhaps if you do get one too as per the other thread and go with a WD Blue would you mind checking that out?

Thanks everyone for the interesting thread.

 

[Screwdriver]

Did they answer your question? I'm also considering getting a TS-128A and would prefer using a WD Blue for the reasons Eric and yourself wrote, though I wouldn't have a way to format it outside of the NAS, so if doesn't recognize it like in your case I'd be stuck.

Is it possible to format it from the NAS via ssh? Eric, perhaps if you do get one too as per the other thread and go with a WD Blue would you mind checking that out?

Thanks everyone for the interesting thread.

Qnap support and Qnap forums said not to use the Blue and suggested a NAS drive even on the single bay TS-128A. Said TLER will have zero issues in a single bay NAS as errors are handled in the NAS somehow.

Anyhow, the Blue failed after a week and I picked up a 4TB WD Red that was on sale and it's been working perfectly. BTW, the Blue was the first WD HD I have ever had fail early. Always had bad luck with Seagates. So don't take my experience as anything but my bad luck.

 

[RMerlin]

Said TLER will have zero issues in a single bay NAS as errors are handled in the NAS somehow.

I don't think whoever answered that understands what TLER is and what it does...

The Wiki article has some good information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control#Standalone_vs._RAID_considerations

 

[FatherLandDescendant]

Qnap forums said not to use the Blue

Glad I didn't check their forums before I bought 4x3TB blues for my TS-431. Those 4 blue drives have been up and running for months with no issues. You may have just gotten your hands on a faulty drive?

Always had bad luck with Seagates

Me too.

 

[sfx2000]

Getting into my 3rd year of a set of Seagate 3TB NAS Enterprise drives in my TS-453Pro...

RAID10, so that pulls some risk out... but the 3TB Seagate Desktop drives from that era...

 

[RMerlin]

Getting into my 3rd year of a set of Seagate 3TB NAS Enterprise drives in my TS-453Pro...

Based on the Backblaze published data, Seagate's enterprise products seem to be much better than their desktop products. I did experience a slightly higher than expected failure rate on some of Seagate's enterprise products tho (mostly used in HP servers, both 2.5" SAS and 3.5" SATA products). I have no first-hand experience with their NAS models however.

 

[grifo]

Qnap support and Qnap forums said not to use the Blue and suggested a NAS drive even on the single bay TS-128A. Said TLER will have zero issues in a single bay NAS as errors are handled in the NAS somehow.

Anyhow, the Blue failed after a week and I picked up a 4TB WD Red that was on sale and it's been working perfectly. BTW, the Blue was the first WD HD I have ever had fail early. Always had bad luck with Seagates. So don't take my experience as anything but my bad luck.

Thanks for replying. If the drive failed so early there's a possibility it wasn't recognized by the NAS because it had issues, though not so likely. Another possibility is that since (if I understand correctly) the blues develop more heat compared to the reds (which are lower power) and the TS-128A's ventilation isn't great (to keep the noise levels low), the blue may have failed because of heat? Then maybe really the blues aren't suitable for this particular NAS. Just speculating, I admit I have no clue about NAS's, this would be my first one.

On a different subject, did you hear a noticeable noise difference between the blue and the red? My NAS would be sitting in a bedroom and I want it to be as quiet as possible, the TS-128A itself should be pretty quiet.

 

[degrub]

If the drive temperature is more than a few degrees above 40 C, then you need to work on the cooling. They will tolerate short term excursions, but for maximum life 40 C is the target.

 

[sfx2000]

My understanding with the NAS rated drives is that they're more tolerant on the windows before declaring an error (TLER for example) as part of other enhancements in the firmware.

It's the number of declared errors that will trigger mdadm to mark a drive bad in an array and go into degraded mode.

 

[Sandman]

I do not recommend using a Red in a non-RAID. Those drive have TLER, which means the likelihood of losing data is higher than with a regular desktop HDD.

If it's not in a RAID, go with a WD Blue, or with a disk where you can manually disable TLER support.

I've just begun researching a new NAS setup, but I thought the WD Blues had a short time idle timer which caused issues in most NAS setups. Perhaps my info is out of date, but I'm curious if anybody has had luck with WD Blue.

 

[Sandman]

Then I simply disagree with their opinion. TLER means in case of any minor read error, your hard disk will immediately give up trying to re-read the sector (as it expects another element of the RAID to take over for it), and result in a hard read error, instead of being potentially able to recover the data on that sector by retrying to read it.

Granted, it's not an every day issue, but in the long term it does reduces your chances of being able to recover from a read error.

I wonder if this article holds clues:
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-features/31202-should-you-use-tler-drives-in-your-raid-nas

from the Samsung white paper, assumes that the RAID controller waits only 8 seconds (or 7 for CCTL) before it marks the drive as bad, enters degraded (or "parity") mode and flags that a drive needs replacing. In reality, this isn't the case for NASes, most of which use software RAID.

The responses I received from Synology, QNAP, NETGEAR and Buffalo all indicated that their NAS RAID controllers don't depend on or even listen to TLER, CCTL, ERC or any other similar error recovery signal from their drives. Instead, their software RAID controllers have their own criteria for drive timeouts, retries and when a drive is finally marked bad.

These software RAID controllers are generally more patient and wait significantly longer for drive response and execute more retries before finally giving up and marking a drive dead. While this may degrade performance slightly when dealing with drives with bad blocks, it's intended to reduce the occurrances of drives dropping out of RAID volumes and the subsequent long, risky rebuilds.

Perhaps backblaze ignores these details as well.

 

[RMerlin]

I thought the WD Blues had a short time idle timer which caused issues in most NAS setups.

That was the Caviar Green, which was designed for backup/infrequent access storage, such as a USB disk.

 

[FatherLandDescendant]

I've just begun researching a new NAS setup, but I thought the WD Blues had a short time idle timer which caused issues in most NAS setups. Perhaps my info is out of date, but I'm curious if anybody has had luck with WD Blue.

Had my Blues in my Qnap431+ coming up on a year now, no problems here.