Synology NAS Western Digital RED Hard Drive FAIL

[alexnoot]

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.

 

I'm sure I heard in the video that he does exactly that?

[newbrain]

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

The switch looks like an unmanaged one so no LAG...but SMB mutichannel will automatically use all the links it can find with no problems.

[EEVblog]

My hard drive hasn't shipped yet, or even progressed through processing yet. I'm startng to think they may not actually have it as claimed...

[EEVblog]

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.

I'm sure I heard in the video that he does exactly that?

Yes, I am binding two ethernet ports.
I get 110MB/s read and write.
Actually I just tested it and got the same speed after disconnecting the 2nd ethernet, so 
EDIT: Oh, I just realised that my PC only has the one 1Gb connection, so yeah 

[Monkeh]

My hard drive hasn't shipped yet, or even progressed through processing yet. I'm startng to think they may not actually have it as claimed...

Thank your local Chia idiots for shafting the storage industry for the second time in the last decade.

Can't buy CPUs. Can't buy GPUs. Can't even buy HDDs. Fuck the rest of us, 0.001% of the population has mining to do!

[EEVblog]

My hard drive hasn't shipped yet, or even progressed through processing yet. I'm startng to think they may not actually have it as claimed...

Thank your local Chia idiots for shafting the storage industry for the second time in the last decade.
Can't buy CPUs. Can't buy GPUs. Can't even buy HDDs. Fuck the rest of us, 0.001% of the population has mining to do!

I have not looked into that, but have heard it's a thing.
Company said they had stock in the warehouse though...
Have also ordered another RED Plus from another company to replace the SMR drive, that one hasn't shipped yet either... (EDIT: It was just packed)

[David Hess]

I have some drives in operation now for 10 years like my original set of 4 x 750G Western Digital Blacks, down to 3, which were the last Black models to support TLER.  After WD updated the firmware to block TLER, I stopped buying from them.  I stopped buying from Seagate after the 7200.10 fiasco.

[EEVblog]

After WD updated the firmware to block TLER, I stopped buying from them.  I stopped buying from Seagate after the 7200.10 fiasco.

What's TLER and 7200.10 fiasco?

[james_s]

After WD updated the firmware to block TLER, I stopped buying from them.  I stopped buying from Seagate after the 7200.10 fiasco.

What's TLER and 7200.10 fiasco?

https://www.abmx.com/blog/what-is-tler#:~:text=This%20feature%20prevents%20hard%20drives,default%2C%20to%20fix%20any%20issues.

[magic]

I think it was the 7200.11 series - the disks sometimes bricked themselves for no reason due to FW bugs.

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!

If you really can't use DOS there is experimental, reverse engineered support for it in hdparm on Linux.
It worked once for me, though it may be a good idea to look for success stories before trying it on a new model.

Also from personal experience, a pair of Seagate's next generation 7200.12 worked fine for years.

[BradC]

If you really can't use DOS there is experimental, reverse engineered support for it in hdparm on Linux.
It worked once for me, though it may be a good idea to look for success stories before trying it on a new model.

Does the job on any WD Red I've bought in recent history, so still a good'un.

I have a set of 2TB greens from the last run before they disabled TLER, and those have at least 6 years on the clock. The only drives I've had issues with were a set of Maxtor (Seagate 7200.11) 1TB. Other than that, keep them spinning, warm and heads loaded and they go for years.

[madires]

I have some drives in operation now for 10 years like my original set of 4 x 750G Western Digital Blacks, down to 3, which were the last Black models to support TLER.  After WD updated the firmware to block TLER, I stopped buying from them.  I stopped buying from Seagate after the 7200.10 fiasco.

Then you don't have many choices left. WD Black have some features in common with the enterprise/server product lines but aren't designed for NAS/SAN. They are meant for power users and workstations. Seagate possibly screwed up more models than the competitors. However, they also produced a lot of good drives. It's a mixed bag.

[edavid]

Is there any current NAS device that has such a short, non-configurable timeout that you would need TLER?

(And from my experience, if a drive is in such bad condition that you would ever see TLER in action, it needs to be replaced immediately.)

[ejeffrey]

My hard drive hasn't shipped yet, or even progressed through processing yet. I'm startng to think they may not actually have it as claimed...

Thank your local Chia idiots for shafting the storage industry for the second time in the last decade.

Can't buy CPUs. Can't buy GPUs. Can't even buy HDDs. Fuck the rest of us, 0.001% of the population has mining to do!

(Stolen from reddit) just wait until the next big cryptocurrency comes out based on "proof of case fans"

[Monkeh]

My hard drive hasn't shipped yet, or even progressed through processing yet. I'm startng to think they may not actually have it as claimed...

Thank your local Chia idiots for shafting the storage industry for the second time in the last decade.

Can't buy CPUs. Can't buy GPUs. Can't even buy HDDs. Fuck the rest of us, 0.001% of the population has mining to do!

(Stolen from reddit) just wait until the next big cryptocurrency comes out based on "proof of case fans"

This is how I end up bald.

[David Hess]

After WD updated the firmware to block TLER, I stopped buying from them.  I stopped buying from Seagate after the 7200.10 fiasco.

What's TLER and 7200.10 fiasco?

TLER is Western Digital's version of error recovery control, Time Limited Error Recovery, which is desirable for RAID.  The Black series of drives supported it until the 750G generation after which it was deliberately removed for purposes of market segmentation.

The Seagate 7200.10 series of drives (or was it the 7200.11 series?) had horrid reliability but Seagate played games to delay returns past their warranty date including releasing faulty firmware updates.

Then you don't have many choices left. WD Black have some features in common with the enterprise/server product lines but aren't designed for NAS/SAN. They are meant for power users and workstations. Seagate possibly screwed up more models than the competitors. However, they also produced a lot of good drives. It's a mixed bag.

The WD Black drives originally supported TLER.

It was not the horribly unreliable and flawed drives that Seagate produced that led me to avoid them in the future.  It was their underhanded tactics to prevent returns and cover up what was going on that convinced me that they could not be trusted.

Since those two events, I have had good results with HGST in various forms.  I am less happy with Samsung but they are no longer a factor.

And of course more recently we have had Western Digital and Seagate (and Toshiba?) concealing which drives use SMR.  That was no oversight.

[madires]

HGST was bought by WD in 2012 and the brand was phased out in 2018.

[David Hess]

HGST was bought by WD in 2012 and the brand was phased out in 2018.

The story is more complex than that with Toshiba receiving the HGST assets for the production of 3.5-inch hard drives.

[EEVblog]

And sure enough the in-stock claim at Mwave was bullshit, 5 days leter I get the yeah-nah email.
Luckily I ordered another one from another suppliser to replace the SMR and that one has shipped apparently.

[David Hess]

And sure enough the in-stock claim at Mwave was bullshit, 5 days leter I get the yeah-nah email.
Luckily I ordered another one from another suppliser to replace the SMR and that one has shipped apparently.

I have encountered a bunch of vendors recently though Amazon and Ebay that list items in stock and available when they drop ship and have no idea what is available.  I am not sure what the scam is but am sure there is one; maybe they are farming reputation?  It made for great difficulty in buying a case for my new workstation; there were 10s of deceptive listings to go through and I finally gave up and had to order a different one through a reputable source.

[BradC]

Is there any current NAS device that has such a short, non-configurable timeout that you would need TLER?

Yeah, most of them. A drive without configured ERC can disappear into the weeds for minutes. What inevitably happens is a read is performed and the drive disappears up its own backside for a while. In the mean time, the NAS tries a reset or a write which fails and it gets kicked from the array before it has a chance to respond.

(And from my experience, if a drive is in such bad condition that you would ever see TLER in action, it needs to be replaced immediately.)

Any read error (recoverable or not) can trigger a delay long enough to cause an issue without TLER. That could have a number of causes, only some of which would indicate any form of pending failure requiring replacement. All TLER does is say "try for x seconds and if you can't get it then give up and I'll find it elsewhere". Incredibly useful behaviour in a redundant array.

Hard drives are electro-mechanical devices. Transient errors happen not at all infrequently. If they didn't the drive manufacturers would not build the firmware to spend a couple of minutes trying to read a difficult sector.

[EEVblog]

[Monkeh]

The little bit of slop on your driver there is to allow you to get it in and out of the screw. I assure you the ones used in the factory are of much higher quality.

None of the sound you recorded was platter contact, just the servo going nuts. I'm guessing head failure. If it had actually crashed the heads would have been torn to shreds. It might have jammed them up on the spacers, though.

[Ed.Kloonk]

The little bit of slop on your driver there is to allow you to get it in and out of the screw. I assure you the ones used in the factory are of much higher quality.

None of the sound you recorded was platter contact, just the servo going nuts. I'm guessing head failure. If it had actually crashed the heads would have been torn to shreds. It might have jammed them up on the spacers, though.

I was wondering about this also. My limited experience of failmodes of WD reds is watching the SMART info from a couple of raids I have and yeah, just listening like Scotty of the Enterprise. When drives went from LBA to whatever voodoo they do now, I remember being told to watch out for drives writing just as a power outage occurs. Apparently, that is drive doom. The head touches the platter for a nano second. No obvious visual evidence. But the damage is done. And you can't even trust the drive reporting anymore since WD knowingly pissed on the WD red brand with the whole SMR bullshit.

[EEVblog]

None of the sound you recorded was platter contact, just the servo going nuts.

Yes, it seems to have recovered somewhat in terms of noise, but it's still way louder than a normal drive. The noise was horrendous though at the time. Maybe it was end stop slamming or something.