WD Red drives


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Anyone have experience withe WD Red NAS drives? They were highly rated so I bought 5 of them for the expansion module on my Synology NAS. Right off the bat, 1 of the 5 was bad and I had to RMA it. This was about a year ago. Now, this morning I heard my NAS beeping and found that a drive had failed. Thank goodness I had it with 1 drive fault tolerance. This is actually one of my original Seagate Barracuda 3TB drives and I ordered a WD Red to replace it. Was I just unlucky because I bought 5 drives at once? All my other WD drives have been working fine. Or, do you guys think WD Black drives are better for a media center NAS?

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No, the WD Black drives are not designed for NAS usage. The WD Red is designed for NAS usage, and is highly regarded. I have 2 WD Red's in a Synology DS-213, and both have been excellent so far (though it's only been 1 year of 24/7 usage)

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If you don't have enough bays for RAID6 then I wouldn't skimp on them otherwise dual parity for the win

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I have used many WD Red drives. For my personal use, I have 4 of the 3TB models in a RAID5 array. Initially, I ordered 3 of them at once, and 1 came DOA. Newegg at the time was having a large amount of reported failures with the drives, and when I returned mine they claimed it was my fault, and when I pointed out the amount of reviews left about DOA drives they agreed to replace mine. The replacement worked great, and the 4th drive I ordered also worked great.

 

I believe there had to have been a large bad batch of drives because there were so many user feedback complaints on Newegg, but as long as you didn't get one of those they seem to be excellent drives.

 

If you want a premium drive, get one of the RE series drives. Whatever you do, RAID is not a backup so keep regular backups of anything you can't do without.

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Good thanks for the input, I'm glad I ordered another Red. Since I got a bad one from Newegg, I took a look at Amazon and it was like $30 cheaper so I'll have it Monday! The volume is already set up so I can't change what kind of RAID it is. Right now it's Synology Hybrid Raid with 1 disk fault tolerance. I did it by mistake instead of 2 disk when I set it up. I don't know if I'll have the option when I put the new drive in or if it will just get parity checked and added to the array. I use my NAS solely for media streaming to XBMC. I have 12.5TB of ripped blu rays on which I don't want to have to go again just to change the raid structure. I suppose I could buy another 5 disk expansion unit and it will give me the option for more drive fault tolerance. As for backups, I can't think of any way to back up 12.5TB of data. As someone pointed out to me, my blu rays are my backups. The only sucky part is if the array fails, I would have to spend weeks re-ripping all of the blu rays. I already had to do that once due to a power outage. I have it connected to a UPS and configured but apparently it still didn't shut down properly. Do you guys have recommendation for Synology or any NAS devices? Or does it matter? Right now I have "Enable UPS support" on and "Shutdown when Diskstation enters safe mode" on. Still, my last power outage about a year ago somehow caused my Diskstation to power off incorrectly, somehow not using the UPS power to shut it down. I had to spend 3 weeks re-ripping all my media.

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