Synology NAS Western Digital RED Hard Drive FAIL

[EEVblog]

A Western Digital RED hard drive in Dave's Synology NAS has finally failed.
Had to happen eventually...

A big controversery in the comments about CMR vs SMR drives. The one that failed is CMR, but I do have one SMR drive in the NAS.

[rolfe]

I had a disk go in one of my NAS boxes at home. When I went to investigate, there was a loud grinding noise coming from the unit.

This is what it looked like (note the prominent groove that has been etched halfway out from the centre!):



After cleaning off the dust(!) this is what one of the platters looked like:



(I was running with 2 redundant units, so getting a replacement and syncing it up was a relatively stress-free process)

Rolfe

[rdl]

How old was it? Everything stops working eventually. I had a Raptor that was 10 years old before I finally replaced it. That's the longest I've ever kept a drive in service. Usually around 5 years or so I start getting paranoid.

edit: I didn't realize there was an embedded video. Only 3 years is a very early death.

[I_Saldana]

Never ever would I advide anyone to go for scammy "extended warranty" options....
except for nas harddrives..
If you see models that temporarily offers 5 year warranty instead of (here it's the usual 2 , mandatory) that's the one I'd go for.

I also stumbled on a few posts concerning just this last year when I had a failed zpool.

This is the page I used to check what I should buy as a replacement:

https://nascompares.com/answer/how-to-tell-a-difference-between-dm-smr-and-non-smr-cmr-drives-hdd-compare/

[newbrain]

A big controversery in the comments about CMR vs SMR drives. The one that failed is CMR, but I do have one SMR drive in the NAS.

SMR are horrible for ZFS and bad for anything else. Might be barely tolerable in a desktop.
In a NAS, I would replace it with something better and maybe repurpose it.

Luckily, most vendors are now being a bit more honest in their specification, not hiding the recording mode in a 4 point text in an appendix behind a "Beware of the Leopard" sticker.
E.g. WD and Seagate

[ejeffrey]

A big controversery in the comments about CMR vs SMR drives. The one that failed is CMR, but I do have one SMR drive in the NAS.

SMR are horrible for ZFS and bad for anything else. Might be barely tolerable in a desktop.
In a NAS, I would replace it with something better and maybe repurpose it.

Definitely terrible for ZFS.  I wouldn't say they are automatically bad for NAS, it depends on the application.  For something that is primarily a backup / archival server it would be fine as long as you don't use ZFS.  For a media server that is almost all read access, with occasional bulk writes it might also work.  For a general purpose file server it's no good, and I wouldn't use it on a desktop either.

[6gv5]

I'm in the process of swapping all my NAS drives due to aging, so I had to go through lots of information about the SMR vs CMR issue during recent months.
Feel free to correct any mistakes.

As far as I can tell, the short story boils down to:

Some vendors (not only WD) started swapping their CMR drives with SMR ones because the technology allows to fit more data in the same space, thus rendering drives cheaper size-wise. So far it seems however WD is the only vendor to clearly indicate which drive uses which technology.

SMR drives aren't inherently defective, but they cannot sustain continuous high loads, which is the case when they're part of a RAID that is being rebuilt. So far it seems they work fine under normal loads in desktop machines, just don't use them in a NAS or a RAID array or put them under heavy load.

CMR are the ones to go, they're good for everything.

Now that is clear that the problem is real, WD segmented further their line of Red drives so that:

"(plain) WD Red" drives are mostly (depending on size) SMR drives, so they're definitely neither intended for continuous load
nor good for RAID arrays. Use them only on desktop machines.

"WD Red Plus" are all CMR plain Red drives relabled as Plus to be easily identifiable, and they're good for NAS/RAID usage.

"WD Red Pro" are also CMR drives, faster also very good for NAS/RAID usage, but aside being faster they're
also more noisy and consume more power, and of course cost more.
Those are the ones to go if one wants maximum reliability and speed.

Given the little difference in price, there would be no reason to buy a plain WD Red drive in place of a Plus one.

Therefore, the Tl;Dr version would be:
1- Don't buy Plain WD Red drives.
2- For Desktops or home/soho NAS use, WD Red Plus are fine.
3- For higher performance/reliability, choose WD Red Pro.

Some information at:
https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-plus-sata-3-5-hdd#WD10EFRX
(check the data sheet!)

Corrections welcome!

[rdl]

True, but it didn't happen until after they got caught trying to sneak it by.

...
So far it seems however WD is the only vendor to clearly indicate which drive uses which technology.
...

[HighVoltage]

I have a SYNOLOGY authorized vendor that sets up lots of NAS in my town and I bough a new NAS a few weeks ago.

He explained to me that only CMR drives will last a long time in the Synology NAS
I bought these drives:
WD Red Plus WD80EFBX 8TB SATA 6Gb/s SOHO-NAS CMR
The bad thing is that WD does not publish this CMR info on the drive label.


A friend did not want to spend the extra money and bought a few none CMR drives and they lasted less than a month in his Synology NAS.

[edavid]

So far it seems however WD is the only vendor to clearly indicate which drive uses which technology.

Seagate was pretty clear about it from when they first started selling SMR drives.

SMR drives aren't inherently defective, but they cannot sustain continuous high loads, which is the case when they're part of a RAID that is being rebuilt. So far it seems they work fine under normal loads in desktop machines, just don't use them in a NAS or a RAID array or put them under heavy load.

They can't sustain continuous high random write loads.  They are fine for high read loads and for sequential writes.  For a read-mostly RAID 1 array, they are fine for normal operation, but a full rebuild can take 2-3X longer than CMR.  So if you are populating a new RAID 1 system, for a workload that is not random write intensive, it can be quite reasonable to choose SMR drives.  If you ever need to do a rebuild, you can decide then if you want to splurge on a CMR drive, or just wait a little longer for the rebuild.

CMR are the ones to go, they're good for everything.

Sure, if the price premium is not too high.  If a CMR drive costs twice as much as an SMR drive, maybe not.

[james_s]

How old was it? Everything stops working eventually. I had a Raptor that was 10 years old before I finally replaced it. That's the longest I've ever kept a drive in service. Usually around 5 years or so I start getting paranoid.

edit: I didn't realize there was an embedded video. Only 3 years is a very early death.

I have drives that are over 30 years old and still "in service", in the sense that they are in vintage machines that I fire up once in a while to play with. The oldest drives in anything that I use semi-regularly are around 15 years old. I haven't had many drives fail, especially not recently. Most of those that have died were not very old at the time, most drives I've replaced were just obsolete, they still worked.

As long as you have a backup I don't really see any reason to be paranoid. A drive can fail at any time, and IIRC there is a bell curve of sorts, where most drives that fail do so when they are either relatively new, or quite old.

[rsjsouza]

Same here. My oldest is a 1989 Seagate 80MB SCSI-1 HDD, followed closely by a Conner 60MB for a laptop I restored last year.

The durability curve is quite weird - my NAS has been operating since 2012 mostly for backup without a glitch, while my dad's NAS bought at the same time with the same drives died in 2015. Go figure. 

[james_s]

I suspect there are a handful of different failure modes and numerous external factors that come into play. It is also possible that manufacturing variance is a significant factor, hard drives are probably one of if not the most precisely made mechanical devices the average person will ever own. Frankly it's astonishing that they work at all, nevermind withstand years or even decades of continuous operation. I remember being blown away that an entire gigabyte could fit on a single 3.5" drive back in the day, and now we are orders of magnitude beyond that. Terabytes are an absolutely mind boggling number of individual bits, the human brain is not even really able to properly visualize such a vast number. If I hadn't seen them work I would never have believed it was possible to store and recover a specific bit out of trillions stored on a small metal platter. Yet it does work, quite reliably, at astonishing speed, with a completely self contained mechanism that can be had for a couple hundred bucks.

[edavid]

A friend did not want to spend the extra money and bought a few none CMR drives and they lasted less than a month in his Synology NAS.

Are there people who believe this kind of tall tale 

[rdl]

Maybe the word "paranoid" was a bit too strong. And to be clear, when I say "in service" I mean daily driver service, getting continuously thrashed by the OS. I have drives that date back to the 1990s that still work. The oldest is the 256MB drive that came in my first computer bought in 1993.

[EEVblog]

CMR are the ones to go, they're good for everything.

Now that is clear that the problem is real, WD segmented further their line of Red drives so that:

"(plain) WD Red" drives are mostly (depending on size) SMR drives, so they're definitely neither intended for continuous load
nor good for RAID arrays. Use them only on desktop machines.

"WD Red Plus" are all CMR plain Red drives relabled as Plus to be easily identifiable, and they're good for NAS/RAID usage.

"WD Red Pro" are also CMR drives, faster also very good for NAS/RAID usage, but aside being faster they're
also more noisy and consume more power, and of course cost more.
Those are the ones to go if one wants maximum reliability and speed.

Correct.
I've bought a RED Plus as a replacement.
Thinking about another Red Plus to replace the working SMR in the NAS. But tempting just to leave it until it fails, as I don't notice any performance problems.

[EEVblog]

FYI, the EFAX (SMR) drive runs 4 degC cooler than the EFRX CMR drives.

[I_Saldana]

Thinking about another Red Plus to replace the working SMR in the NAS. But tempting just to leave it until it fails, as I don't notice any performance problems.

Also, depending on the amount of total drives consider a spare for the cupboard. It's not good for warranty but good for your nerves and for the knowledge you can have at least one more fail with the hardware you use still existing.

[SiliconWizard]

I have 3 WD Red HDDs in my NAS. So far so good. But it had WD Green HDDs before, and I had to replace them. WD Green drives were the most horrible drives for NAS use. Although their power consumption was nicely low, their main problem is that they would park their head all the time - and this was not configurable. That would end up ruining the head drive mechanism. This was particularly bad for a home NAS, for which the typical use is NOT constant access to the drives, so that would trigger the head parking much too frequently.

The RED drives do not have this problem, but I know they are not the most reliable out there. I always keep an eye on the drives' SMART data and the state of my RAID.

[madires]

WD Green are meant for desktop usage.

[newbrain]

WD Green [...] would park their head all the time - and this was not configurable.

A WD utility (WDIDLE or WDIDLE3) could alter some FW parameter to avoid the unwanted head parking.
I have had two WD Green HDs in my NAS until one recently failed*, and both were not parking their heads after using the utility - the difficult part was getting MS-DOS up and having it recognize the drives!

* EtA: not really, just a single checksum error, corrected after a resilver. But I would not trust it any longer.

[ejeffrey]

"WD Red Plus" are all CMR plain Red drives relabled as Plus to be easily identifiable, and they're good for NAS/RAID usage.

"WD Red Pro" are also CMR drives, faster also very good for NAS/RAID usage, but aside being faster they're
also more noisy and consume more power, and of course cost more.
Those are the ones to go if one wants maximum reliability and speed.

WD red plus vs. pro have very similar performance.  The pro does have a slightly higher peak transfer rate at comparable capacity point but that is relatively minor.  The main difference is the Pro has vibration sensors for reliable use in high drive count applications.  It also has longer warranty, so it isn't a bad choice if you want reliable NAS storage but don't expect dramatically performance than the Plus.

[EEVblog]

"WD Red Plus" are all CMR plain Red drives relabled as Plus to be easily identifiable, and they're good for NAS/RAID usage.

"WD Red Pro" are also CMR drives, faster also very good for NAS/RAID usage, but aside being faster they're
also more noisy and consume more power, and of course cost more.
Those are the ones to go if one wants maximum reliability and speed.

WD red plus vs. pro have very similar performance.  The pro does have a slightly higher peak transfer rate at comparable capacity point but that is relatively minor.  The main difference is the Pro has vibration sensors for reliable use in high drive count applications.  It also has longer warranty, so it isn't a bad choice if you want reliable NAS storage but don't expect dramatically performance than the Plus.

I have no need for the high speed. My NAS is only 1Gb ethernet anyway, and the limit is not the drive speed.

[HighVoltage]

I have no need for the high speed. My NAS is only 1Gb ethernet anyway, and the limit is not the drive speed.

You might know this already but you can use both of the 1 Gb connections on the Synology NAS and merge them in to one connection to get higher speeds.

 

[madires]

... bundle them into a LAG if your switch supports LACP.