4 ms·

And is there any reason to not trust WD Red drives in my home NAS?

by mikece 7y ago

brandmeyer 7y ago
The plural of anecdote is not data. The point of backblaze's publication is to share statistical data with the public at large. Their dataset doesn't include any WD Red drives, therefore, the data does not provide a statement about WD Red drives' reliability in either direction. Consider this: the least reliable drive in this dataset has a 2.7% annualized failure rate at an average age of almost 4 years. That's low enough that many SOHO users will never see a failure, yet high enough that a rack worth will have seen more than one failure recently. Thus, your question could be answered with complete honesty in both ways: with anecdotes by happy users and with anecdotes by unhappy users. Therefore, neither positive nor negative answers are useful to you. This phenomenon underlies the fundamental weakness of self-reported online reviews. You cannot actually get a useful measurement for how reliable a product is solely by self-reported sparse feedback.
ahnick 7y ago
You shouldn't trust any drive. Trust in probabilities to protect you. You should be backing up your NAS to either a cloud provider, an external drive (if data will fit), or another NAS. Make sure to locate one copy offsite and practice restoring from your backup.
kabdib 7y ago
All drives will fail. You're just buying time (or rather, the likelihood of getting more time out of the drive). I've had a couple of WD reds fail. You pop in another and rebuild the volume. It's normal as long as it's not too often.
nolok 7y ago
Your question makes no sense. Any drive can and will fail, and no matter the brand it may fail immediately or it may last years. The rule is to avoid all of your drive being from the same factory date/batch, even if they're all from the same brand order from different stores or whatever to help make sure in case of a defect they're not all affected. Also for home NAS ensure you have redundancy (a proper raid level, avoid JBOD and Raid-0), and have backups. Raid is not a backup.
- hddherman 7y ago
  I would add data integrity to the list, in addition to redundancy and backups. ZFS is great in this regard: redundancy, data scrubbing to ensure data integrity and built-in snapshotting and data replication features (zfs send-receive). Can't believe how I got by without ZFS in my earlier years of data hoarding.
  - nolok 7y ago
    Absolutely right, most home Nas don't have zfs but can use btrfs, which helps protect against bit rot and offers proper data scrubbing.
zlynx 7y ago
I trust the Reds. Although, as someone else just said, it's an anecdote, not real data like the Backblaze report. I started my NAS in 2012 with two 2 TB Red drives. Later I added two 6 TB Red drives. Some time, around 2016 I think, one of the 2 TB Reds failed and I replaced it with another 6 TB. Then the other 2 TB Red failed, like a year later and I put in another 6 TB so they all matched. I did not get replacements even though one failed during its warranty period (I am pretty sure the 2 TB Reds still had a 5-yr warranty at that time), because I wanted to replace it with a 6 TB anyway. Currently all four 6 TB drives are still running, plus a couple of 4 TB Toshibas I grabbed at some point. So, I don't think that drive failure after 4 or 5 years is so bad. I got my money's worth anyway, and that's why a NAS has redundant drives.
myself248 7y ago
In reality, there are only two kinds of hard drive: Those which have already failed, and those which will.
bscphil 7y ago
Practically speaking there's no way to avoid them (or their white-label equivalents) if you're on a typical home budget and you buy any significant number of drives. They're just too cheap (when you get the Easystores) compared to any other way of acquiring a large amount of disk space. I'd rather buy WD than Seagate, but that's just me. I don't really have a choice. Maybe the only people who have a choice are either in the enterprise or buying one drive every few years for a PC build or something.

And is there any reason to not trust WD Red drives in my home NAS?

by mikece 7y ago

And is there any reason to not trust WD Red drives in my home NAS?

The plural of anecdote is not data. The point of backblaze's publication is to share statistical data with the public at large. Their dataset doesn't include any WD Red drives, therefore, the data does not provide a statement about WD Red drives' reliability in either direction. Consider this: the least reliable drive in this dataset has a 2.7% annualized failure rate at an average age of almost 4 years. That's low enough that many SOHO users will never see a failure, yet high enough that a rack worth will have seen more than one failure recently. Thus, your question could be answered with complete honesty in both ways: with anecdotes by happy users and with anecdotes by unhappy users. Therefore, neither positive nor negative answers are useful to you. This phenomenon underlies the fundamental weakness of self-reported online reviews. You cannot actually get a useful measurement for how reliable a product is solely by self-reported sparse feedback.

ahnick 7y ago

You shouldn't trust any drive. Trust in probabilities to protect you. You should be backing up your NAS to either a cloud provider, an external drive (if data will fit), or another NAS. Make sure to locate one copy offsite and practice restoring from your backup.

kabdib 7y ago

All drives will fail. You're just buying time (or rather, the likelihood of getting more time out of the drive). I've had a couple of WD reds fail. You pop in another and rebuild the volume. It's normal as long as it's not too often.

nolok 7y ago

Your question makes no sense. Any drive can and will fail, and no matter the brand it may fail immediately or it may last years. The rule is to avoid all of your drive being from the same factory date/batch, even if they're all from the same brand order from different stores or whatever to help make sure in case of a defect they're not all affected. Also for home NAS ensure you have redundancy (a proper raid level, avoid JBOD and Raid-0), and have backups. Raid is not a backup.

hddherman 7y ago
I would add data integrity to the list, in addition to redundancy and backups. ZFS is great in this regard: redundancy, data scrubbing to ensure data integrity and built-in snapshotting and data replication features (zfs send-receive). Can't believe how I got by without ZFS in my earlier years of data hoarding.
- nolok 7y ago
  Absolutely right, most home Nas don't have zfs but can use btrfs, which helps protect against bit rot and offers proper data scrubbing.

zlynx 7y ago

I trust the Reds. Although, as someone else just said, it's an anecdote, not real data like the Backblaze report. I started my NAS in 2012 with two 2 TB Red drives. Later I added two 6 TB Red drives. Some time, around 2016 I think, one of the 2 TB Reds failed and I replaced it with another 6 TB. Then the other 2 TB Red failed, like a year later and I put in another 6 TB so they all matched. I did not get replacements even though one failed during its warranty period (I am pretty sure the 2 TB Reds still had a 5-yr warranty at that time), because I wanted to replace it with a 6 TB anyway. Currently all four 6 TB drives are still running, plus a couple of 4 TB Toshibas I grabbed at some point. So, I don't think that drive failure after 4 or 5 years is so bad. I got my money's worth anyway, and that's why a NAS has redundant drives.

myself248 7y ago

In reality, there are only two kinds of hard drive: Those which have already failed, and those which will.

bscphil 7y ago

Practically speaking there's no way to avoid them (or their white-label equivalents) if you're on a typical home budget and you buy any significant number of drives. They're just too cheap (when you get the Easystores) compared to any other way of acquiring a large amount of disk space. I'd rather buy WD than Seagate, but that's just me. I don't really have a choice. Maybe the only people who have a choice are either in the enterprise or buying one drive every few years for a PC build or something.