5 of 10 WD green drives failed in 2.5 years

[SadisticHen]

Hi Guys,

10 years working in the IT industry and I think this is the first time I've ever contributed to a forum, albeit about 2 months too late.

Your comments got me interested because I'm running 8x2TB WD Green drives in my server/nas. I think I started with 7 x WD20EARX and 1 x WD20EARS. My server case is an old server case that I bought locally second hand. It has 8 x 5.25" drive bays, I use 5.25" to 3.5" adapters so that the drives have a bit of space between them so they are not cramped together.

I'm running a HP P400 Smart Array controller with RAID6, and Windows Server, So no FreeNAS for me (am I allowed to say that here:). I know I shouldn't be running hardware raid without TLER... yada, yada, yada..

It's been up and running for 2 years now, and I just lost my 4th drive. A few of the drives are older than 2 years - they were used in my normal desktop for 1-2 years first.

It runs 24x7, I have not run wdidle - I can't run it with the controller, so I need to take each drive out individually and run it, and I just can't be bothered and don't want the down time or rebuild time as it hosts several websites and applications.

Anyway, as I said, I'm losing one drive out of eight every 6 months. I see that when I bought the WD Green Drives 2 years ago, they had a 5 year warranty. Now if you buy a WD Green drive, it has a 2 year warranty.

I'm perfectly happy dropping in a new drive and letting it rebuild when one breaks, I have spare that I keep next to the server, and then I just RMA the broken one and the RMA replacement becomes the spare.

So anyway, in summary - my failure rate is about the same as yours. Don't think you're doing anything wrong. These drives just don't last that long (as shown by reduced warranty) and it is possibly because they were not designed to be running in servers 24x7.

Still way better than my personal experiences with Seagates.

 

[Yatti420]

Without WDIDLE ran on the green drives the load cycle counts get ridiculous.. 100,000 a year for a nas system with media is easy.. For the greens in this environment I think it's worth the time to run it if you haven't already.. My first green didn't get so far letting it use stock idle settings.. I think with playing media and cahching it;ll just idle/maybe spindown then need to spinup again right away..

I'm watching a lightly used windows 7 system with a wd20earx (stock intellipark timings) 2tb already close to 100,000.. Less then a year..

http://www.storagereview.com/how_to...igital_2tb_caviar_green_wd20ears_with_wdidle3

http://www.networkedmediatank.com/printthread.php?tid=20686

 

[cyberjock]

Yatti is 100% correct. Your disks go bad and WD may not warranty it if your load cycle is abnormally high. Not to mention this decreases the wear and tear on the drives, so there is no downside.

 

[Yatti420]

I would be on the fence to add this to the documentation and/or a sticky of some sort on the forums for Western Digital green owners.. I've never had a red and I doubt this is an issue on these.. I would expect a longer and/or different idle method on the reds..

I certainly think a longer life cycle is achieved by using WDIDLE and then still using the green drives as intended.. Mine are in a mirror and I barely use them.. For extra backups and stuff just to be safe usually.. I let freenas control when the discs sleep and/if they can take advantage of the apm features etc..

 

[cyberjock]

It should NOT go in the manual as it is not FreeNAS' responsibility to support non-FreeNAS issues. And this issue is NOT limited to FreeNAS. If you aren't competent to do your own homework and figure this stuff out, then its your loss. I'll continue to mention it in the forum, but putting it in the manual is not how to handle it.