Keep two home NAS devices synced?

[matthelm]

Do red customers get a refurb for warranty replacement?

I replaced 1 of 10 of my red, and it had all zeros (or defaults) in the SMART data, but then I assume they can reset it if they wish. It looked unused, and had no scratches near the screw holes. I formatted it (full) and filled it 2 or 3 times, and checked all the data. All good.

Of course, about the only refurbs they had when I bought mine, were people that said it didn't work because they didn't know how to hook it up, or didn't know what they were buying, and returned it because it was slower than the 7200rpm drives.

 

[Terry Kennedy]

You are incorrect on this. I just went thru it, and when I place it in my account on WD's site, the warranty was from that day. (they removed the returned drive from the list) It only saved me a month or so, but it was from the date entered, not the old drive's date.

It would be interesting to see what happens when an older drive is RMA'd. I've had Black RE4's come back as replacements showing only 30 days or so left on the warranty and had to have my account rep fix the dates.

I expect there's a month or so of allowable "slop" in the "date of purchase" when you register a drive on your profile. It may have been that the "date of manufacture" (for shipping purposes, not the "real" DoM) was within 30 days of when you got the drive.

For many users who don't register their drives (or who assume that replacements for registered drives are already themselves registered), the important date is when WD thinks the warranty expires on an unregistered drive.

 

[Terry Kennedy]

Of course, about the only refurbs they had when I bought mine, were people that said it didn't work because they didn't know how to hook it up, or didn't know what they were buying, and returned it because it was slower than the 7200rpm drives.

As far as I know, WD doesn't sell refurbished drives through normal channels. If you get an "open box" deal from a big box store or online retailer, that was probably a loop through that seller and WD doesn't know it was re-sold.

 

[clintb]

Duly noted. RAID 1 fits into my "protection plan" only at the level of convenience, in a multi-pronged strategy.

If anyone has newer, broad, data on 1-4TB consumer SATA HD failure, I'd be interested in seeing it.

(Complete unscientific conjecture) but I think one reason we may hear less about catastrophic HD failure today is (intentionally or out of sheer luck) people spread their data out more in multiple places (internal drives, external drives, USB flash drives, cloud) and might be enabling some automatic data syncing services (photos, music, and docs syncing across devices, etc) purely out of convenience but maybe they are benefiting from that setup if a device should fail too.

It's hard to get clear real world failure & RMA rates from drive manufacturers, but in 2009 Carbonite cloud backup service reported that 11% of its users were restoring a full backup annually. http://www.carbonite.com/blog/cloud-backup-blog/2009/11/23/Laptop-Failure-Rates

Not specifically on the larger drives, but very interesting none the less.
http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/26/netapp-weighs-in-on-disks/

 

[stevech]

full sync upload or restore via download... on a residential ISP data rate - is crazy-slow. A few backup service providers will charge $0 or small $ to mail a USB drive instead of trying to move 50GB on a slow connection. I was reading about one that's $0 yesterday, to my surprise.

Me, just use a USB3 backup drive and keep it away from thieving eyes.

Those cloud storage services have their place. Not for full backup. Great for file sharing, unless your NAS does so.

 

[stevech]

Not specifically on the larger drives, but very interesting none the less.
http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/26/netapp-weighs-in-on-disks/

circa 2007

 

[Terry Kennedy]

circa 2007

Unfortunately, by the time there's substantial real-world experience with a drive, both the manufacturer and their large-volume customers have moved on to a new design, often with new technology and new problems.

This is by no means a new phenomenon - CMI shipped hundreds of thousands of 20MB disk drives to IBM for the PC/AT and a very large subset of them subsequently failed. Yet they made it through both CMI's and IBM's QA departments.

 

[stevech]

Yep. Iomega arguably set the benchmark
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3000_7-6160861-1.html

As well, their Bernoulli Box drives!

 

[coxhaus]

You know if it were me and I wanted to sync 2 NAS boxes I would look at robocopy on a windows PC or server and use the mirror command. Using the mirror command will allow only the changes to be sent which will reduce the data transferred to only the changes. You can also schedule the job once defined. There are few other parameters robocopy has which are worth looking at. Check it out.

 

[stevech]

maybe depends on fault code. Twice, WD replaced a failed drive I sent in that was still in the warranty period. Both times, then sent a refurb replacement with no extension of the warranty expiration date. That's the norm in consumer products of all kinds, in my experiences. Makes sense, else people would abuse it.