The WD Elements 8TB still have HGST HE8 in them

Yorick

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You are referring to the power disable pin, and the unfortunate habit of PSU makers to still put 3.3V onto that.

I’ve solved it by pushing out that pin on the PSU side of the cable, since mine is fully modular.

A friend solved it by cutting that strand of the cable, do be sure you have your layout right because wow, that’s destructive.

Several folk on the Intertubes have solved it by putting a thin strip of Kapton tape onto the disk’s power connector where that 3.3V connects.
 

Yorick

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WD100EMAZ

I do believe that’s the HE version of the 10TB drive, yes. It’ll be obvious when you look at it.

FreeNAS has a small (2GB) swap space on each disk that is there to allow for slight size differences between drives when replacing. Any other 10TB model would work as a replacement. Check the docs, they talk about that in some detail. Happily no one makes 9.9TB models so you’re safe there :).

And yes, you cannot replace a 10TB disk in a vdev with an 8TB disk, that will never work. You can build a vdev from the ground up like that, but that’s a separate use case.
 

elorimer

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Several folk on the Intertubes have solved it by putting a thin strip of Kapton tape onto the disk’s power connector where that 3.3V connects.
Or, connecting the sata power cable to a molex connector.
 

Yorick

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connecting the sata power cable to a molex connector

All of my hairs start bristling at that notion. I know that works, and there's technically nothing wrong with it - but I'd cut a strand before having eight molex to sata adapters in my case.

In the end though, whatever works, does.
 

elorimer

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but I'd cut a strand before having eight molex to sata adapters in my case.
Fair point. Neatness counts.

In my case I have 6 drives run by a PicoPSU 150 with one sata power connection and one molex connection. My main pool is 4 drives, and the other two are backup pools. So I split the sata power connection to the two drives, and the molex to the four drives with a monoprice 1x4 splitter. So yes, if you have the sata plugs off a normal power supply you probably already have four on one line.
 

elorimer

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Going to go from 5-wide raidz2 to 8-wide raidz2
I didn't think we could do that yet. Curious to know your plan if you have, like, 20TB in that pool.
 
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NAS___

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Drive passed fio test successfully. Left it in the USB enclosure, so bandwidth is maybe not the best, but no sign of IOPS stalling :smile:. Average is 16 IOPS. Now it's running a long smart test, then badblocks. I added a small fan behind the box to keep it cool. If all succeeds, I'll open the box and extract the drive :grin:

For 3.3v, I saw some use capton tape. Maybe standard electric tape is too thick. I'll use that:
 

Yorick

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I didn't think we could do that yet.

Not through raidz expansion. I had built a test rig with 6x2TB to work on testing the expansion code (and then, shame, never did), so I'm adding another 2x2TB to that test rig, will run it as a raidz1 (12.2 TiB usable) and send/recv my video files and sundry stuff in there (11.4 TiB), and throw away the backup dataset (4.4 TiB). Then rebuild my main raidz2 - likely on TrueNAS 12 which means I am then not going back to 11.3 - and send/recv the other way, recreate backup dataset manually and do a full backup on the three Windows machines that run into it.

The test rig is actually my main Windows machine, I just threw a HBA and a bunch of disks into it and a Linux dual-boot. I'll run TrueNAS Core from USB stick for this send/recv, should be fine for the amount of time I need it. No Windows machine while that's all going on :).

Some caveats here, my husband loves keeping old backups around so there are some files we need to figure out what to do with. I think they're useless at this point, haven't been touched in years, and, who knows. I think best option is to rope him into taking a look at those old backups and really determine whether there's anything in there he needs, and if so take just those files out.

So, why now? Well, I am at 75% used. I can hang on another year. And, there's no guarantee raidz expansion will be here in another year, and the longer I wait, the more challenging it gets to fit my data into the test machine, or a single 14TB drive. It already won't fit into a single 12TB. I debated just adding one 8TB drive, which will be enough for the next 3 years I think - but then I didn't think I'd get to 15.8 TiB used in 1.5 years, so screw it, I'm going for 8. That's the amount of SATA ports I have, it doubles my usable storage, and if that's not enough, I have a problem and should see Storaholics Anonymous.
 

elorimer

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Yorick

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HolyK

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Just received the disks.
Connected one to USB, model is WD100EMAZ.
Is it a good drive? It's still the HE model?
I have to ask Amazon to resend one of them as one box has drop signs...
WD120EMAZ (12TB model with same specs like the 10TB one) is just fine as well as WD120EMFZ. The second one is newer version with 512MB cache (first one has 256MB). Both are Helium filled HDDs.

Drive passed fio test successfully. Left it in the USB enclosure, so bandwidth is maybe not the best, but no sign of IOPS stalling :smile:. Average is 16 IOPS. Now it's running a long smart test, then badblocks. I added a small fan behind the box to keep it cool. If all succeeds, I'll open the box and extract the drive :grin:

For 3.3v, I saw some use capton tape. Maybe standard electric tape is too thick. I'll use that:

Kapton tape is best. I literary just replaced two of my 2TB REDs by 12TB White shucked from Elements. All three pins are covered by kapton tape like the six other Whites I've replaced back in January. No problems at all. Just be sure to cover the pin3 fully and bend a bit of the tape around the power connector. It helps to keep the tape in place when plugging/unplugging the connector. And IF the small piece of tape gets stuck in the power connector it is easier to pull it out.

Like this ... and bend it over + stick it to the bottom of the connector. Also i've used wooden toothpick to gently press the tape to the connector and the spaces in between the contacts. After that it sticks in place just fine.
1595161565728.png

(Photo from google, not mine)
 
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Yorick

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Kapton tape is best.

Debatable. It certainly works well. I like pushing out the 3.3V pin on the PSU-side of the cable because:
- I have to do it only once per four drives
- It works when I replace a drive, without needing to touch that drive
- Once I have the right pin identified, it is absolutely foolproof, I can't misalign anything

This is what that looks like on a Seasonic. Note there is NO standard for the PSU-side of the cable, the pinout will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.

seasonic-minus-3.3v.jpg
 
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HolyK

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@Yorick I don't have modular PSU so can't do that. Also as you mentioned one should be VERY careful which pin is which as this is manufacturer-specific. (BTW I've changed the picture to thumbnail so hope you don't mind :])

There are several more approaches, like:
- MOLEX to SATA (lose your data ^^) adapters. I have these as well as i have 8 HDDs and i don't like chaining more than one splitters in serial. Anyway ensure that the quality adapter/splitter is used to avoid catching fire (google details)
- Cut the 3.3V wire before the SATA connector. Cover it by shrink-tube, termination/cover caps or eletric tape. I don't like destructive approaches so in this case i would do that on the SATA splitter adapters and NOT on the PSU wires
- Pull-out the 3.3V pins from connector and tape/shrinktube the pins. Well this one might not be that destructive but it is a bit tricky as these tiny/thin pins can easily bend/break of. So again do this on the splitters and not on the PSU wires/connectors.
- Snap out the third pin from HDD connector. Permanent modification and voids warranty.
- Desolder the third pin from HDD PCB. Well this one is PRO mod over 9000. I wouldn't dare to do this on my HDDs :D
 

diedrichg

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Kapton tape is best.

Like this ... and bend it over + stick it to the bottom of the connector. Also i've used wooden toothpick to gently press the tape to the connector and the spaces in between the contacts. After that it sticks in place just fine.
View attachment 40230
(Photo from google, not mine)
Thanks for the photo! Everything I have seen on the YouTubes had them placing a tiny-ass strip of Kapton tape over the long third pin, good to know I can cover all three. I just bought some Kapton tape on Amazon last night. I'll be ready to rock & roll next week on these new 8TBs!
 

HolyK

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... good to know I can cover all three. ...
Correct, pins 1 and 2 are 3.3V power. Third pin is the "3.3V PWDIS" (as per SATA rev. 3.3). Interesting information is that HDDs are actually using the +3.3V as well but in order to keep back-compatibility with MOLEX (which does not have 3.3V pin, only +5V and +12V) they're not actually using the 3.3V pins to get such power but basically every (conventional) HDD has its own converter from 5V to 3.3V on PCB. Meaning the first two pins are basically useless and the third one is situational. In your case cover all three and you're good to go :]

Frankly i am not aware about anything actually using the 3.3V from pin1 and 2. Maybe there is some very specific "device" used in very specialized systems. Paging our local guru @jgreco as he might have some experience with such thing :]
 

jgreco

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Only a few esoteric things.

During the early days of the SATA standard, the world was rapidly changing, just having adopted the ATX standard, and designers thought that there would continue to be a sea change in storage, having watched the transition from ESDI/SCSI to MFM to RLL to IDE to PATA. The "Molex" (actually AMP Mate-N-Lock) was originally used on 5.25" full height drives and it was felt that it was as dated as the AT power supply standard, and with SAS and SATA being brand spankin' new, a power connector with a similar form factor to the SATA data connector would make it possible for SAS and SATA to have a direct-plug capability for backplanes similar to SCA SCSI.

It was thought, during that time, that 5V electronics were power-hungry and inefficient, and there was already a lot of 3.3v prevalent on mainboards and expansion cards. So some enterprising and forward-thinking designers added 3.3v to the SATA power supply connector, thinking that it would provide a transition path. Unfortunately, the frequent use of "Molex" to SATA power connector adapters was one of various factors that made it difficult for 3.3v to gain any traction, and better voltage converters made it less urgent to have 3.3v supplied from the PSU. Lower voltages also tend to sag more over distance, so the 3.3v option never really got much uptake and as @HolyK says, generally converted from 5v or 12v on the drive itself.

However, in the meantime, it became apparent that there was some missing functionality that could use a few extra pins, so ... well you know the rest of the story.
 

NAS___

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When disk is in USB enclosure, it goes to sleep after some time, I had to use a small "watch" function trick to write to disk periodically to get my long smart test done.
How do you check disk integrity in addition to long smart test? Just realized it will take many days to run badblocks on a 10Tb drive, even with -w -b 4096...

For 3.3v discussion, I finally bought this 1€ adapter. Much cheaper than buying kapton tape, even if it's not as neat in the NAS box.
 

Yorick

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How do you check disk integrity in addition to long smart test? Just realized it will take many days to run badblocks on a 10Tb drive, even with -w -b 4096

I test after shucking, using the script linked in these forums that runs smart test, bad blocks, and smart test again. Yes, it’ll likely take the better part of a week, and it’ll write enough data to get the third of a way to a hard error on an 10E15 (enterprise) drive, and to three or four hard errors (statistically only) on a consumer 10E14. that’s the point though, to flush out “infant mortality”.

Side note: The WD Red are rated at 10E14, the Purple at 10E15, and these shucked HGST are 10E15 as well. Kinda funny that the hard error rating on an Elements can be better than a Red.
 
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