To shuck or not to shuck....

[tomahawkeer]

I will preface this by saying, that I am very new to Freenas as well as this community, and I did do a search to try to find some good answers, however, everything just kind of skimmed the surface.

So with that being said, is there a benefit to using shucked drives in freenas, outside of the obvious lower price? Reliability / performance issues?

I was in the process of building my first freenas server, and im basically looking to replace a workstation / drobo USB device combo, that runs a plex server, and shares out storage to the rest of my devices on my network. That setup actually works well for me, however, the workstation is older, and using a proprietary device like a drobo (or synology or qnas etc) is something that I just don't like to do / rely on, especially with aging hardware (4 x 4tb red drives and almost 3 year old drobo), and a gen 1 I7 workstation.

I had spare parts sitting around, basically a Gen 3 I7 3770, and 16gb of ram, and 5 x 8TB wd harddrives, so I decided to buy a case / psu and a few other odds and ends to make it work. Needless to say, I had no issue getting freenas up and running (booting to thumbdrive), I was able to shuck all 5 harddrives, and get them into the server without issue. 1 problem, is the fact that 3 of the drives (I knew this prior to shucking) were probably bad and also already out of warranty. The other 2 were also out of warranty, but tested good.

My question now, is do I buy a few more 8TB drives to shuck (2 or 3ish) to complete the build, or do I start from scratch and just buy actual internal harddrives / red drives etc. Yes, I know I could take the 4TB from the drobo, that is also an option, but I wouldn't mind have the drives be newer.

Any feedback would be great.

 

[Chris Moore]

booting to thumbdrive

I suggest changing to a very inexpensive SSD. The USB memory sticks are not very durable in many instances. I have had several fail for me over the years. They just don't hold up to the constant use. In the early days, when that was the standard, FreeNAS was able to be loaded entirely memory resident, so the USB stick didn't get any use. That is just now how the OS runs now.

My question now, is do I buy a few more 8TB drives to shuck (2 or 3ish) to complete the build, or do I start from scratch and just buy actual internal harddrives / red drives etc. Yes, I know I could take the 4TB from the drobo, that is also an option, but I wouldn't mind have the drives be newer.

You just never know what you will get with the shucked drives. Some folks have had good luck and gotten a desirable model drive where other folks have gotten a drive that uses SMR. SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) does not play well with ZFS and those drives perform much worse than would be desirable. I did a drive refresh in one of my servers last year (or earlier this year) and ended up with two of the SMR drives in a population of 12 drives. It is amazing how much two slow drives can drag down the overall performance of the pool. The only other potential pitfall of the shucked drives is that sometimes you can't get warranty on them and the warranty on them tends to be shorter. I take my chances on the warranty because I generally see the failure in the first year if the drive is going to fail. If my drives make it past the first year, they are usually good to go to around five years before the failure rate becomes a problem.

In the end, you just need to watch out for the SMR drives, which the vendors are not clearly marking as SMR drives, and that is a problem even with some regular retail drives. Otherwise, you are just being wise about spending your money. It doesn't take a lot of work to cut your cost of drives in half with shucking.

Good Luck

 

[tomahawkeer]

I suggest changing to a very inexpensive SSD. The USB memory sticks are not very durable in many instances. I have had several fail for me over the years. They just don't hold up to the constant use. In the early days, when that was the standard, FreeNAS was able to be loaded entirely memory resident, so the USB stick didn't get any use. That is just now how the OS runs now.

You just never know what you will get with the shucked drives. Some folks have had good luck and gotten a desirable model drive where other folks have gotten a drive that uses SMR. SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) does not play well with ZFS and those drives perform much worse than would be desirable. I did a drive refresh in one of my servers last year (or earlier this year) and ended up with two of the SMR drives in a population of 12 drives. It is amazing how much two slow drives can drag down the overall performance of the pool. The only other potential pitfall of the shucked drives is that sometimes you can't get warranty on them and the warranty on them tends to be shorter. I take my chances on the warranty because I generally see the failure in the first year if the drive is going to fail. If my drives make it past the first year, they are usually good to go to around five years before the failure rate becomes a problem.

In the end, you just need to watch out for the SMR drives, which the vendors are not clearly marking as SMR drives, and that is a problem even with some regular retail drives. Otherwise, you are just being wise about spending your money. It doesn't take a lot of work to cut your cost of drives in half with shucking.

Good Luck

The thumb drive is a pretty easy fix. I actually already bout a small SSD, and had originally thought of using it for cache / slog etc, but I don't think it will be necessary with the small build that I will have. Could easily buy another not a big deal.

I am not familiar with the SMR type drives, I will have to research it a bit. I tend to stick with WD and ive had success in the past with the WD Red drives in pre-made NAS devices.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[Linkman]

I just picked up two more 8TB WD Easystore externals from Best Buy, that makes four total and I plan to replace the 4x3TB pool in my second FreeNAS box with the 4x8TB. You can check the S.M.A.R.T. data via something like SmartmonTools, even before shucking and search the model numbers to see what the drive actually is. I run short and long S.M.A.R.T. tests and check the model before even thinking of shucking, then post-shuck run the usual hard drive burn-in with badblocks. The one I'm waiting on the long test for right now is a white label HGST helium drive.

 

[tomahawkeer]

How has the reliability of the shucked drives been so far ?

 

[Linkman]

I have not put them into service yet, since I just got the second pair this week. Needed four to replace my 4x3TB pool.

I have no more concerns about reliability than I would with the usual WD Red drives.

These four are all white label made-in-Thailand relabeled HGST helium drives, 256MB cache, 5400 RPM. They've all passed short and long S.M.A.R.T. tests, but I won't run the badblocks burn-in till they're in the server, they hit 50 C just doing the S.M.A.R.T. tests in the external enclosures, and I would like better cooling for the burn-in.

 

[Jailer]

How has the reliability of the shucked drives been so far ?

It shouldn't be any different than any other drive. I have just over 8K hours on mine and no issues so far.

 

[droeders]

They've all passed short and long S.M.A.R.T. tests, but I won't run the badblocks burn-in till they're in the server, they hit 50 C just doing the S.M.A.R.T. tests in the external enclosures, and I would like better cooling for the burn-in.

I had the same issue with temps in the standard enclosures. I wanted to run at least one badblocks on them before shucking so I ended up running a small fan across them to keep them cool.

I had one drive fail during burn-in/SMART testing (easily returned), but the ones that passed have been great so far (~1.5 years of runtime).

 

[Constantin]

No failures with shucked drives so far, the cohort of refurb drives has had a much higher failure rate. (1 DOA, 1 later failure, out of a cohort of 9 disks). Worldwide Product Importer paid for return of first, made me pay for return of second drive. The refurbs are 7200RPM HE10 models that were allegedly 2 years old at time of purchase, refurbished, etc.

Both drives were fully refunded in full since WPI allegedly had no additional drives to replace them with. What is odd is that WPI and Goharddrive.com seem to be either the same entity or closely affiliated... and goharddrive had similar drives in stock... but at a higher price than what I had paid WPI @ Amazon for the first batch of 9 drives. Makes me wonder if the refund is the result of being able to command a higher price currently (~$234) vs. what I paid for them in the past (~$214).

The latest purchase burned in OK.

 

[diedrichg]

The only other potential pitfall of the shucked drives is that sometimes you can't get warranty on them and the warranty on them tends to be shorter.

Western Digital specifically announced [earlier this year?] that they would not warranty a shucked drive.

 

[Constantin]

Western Digital specifically announced [earlier this year?] that they would not warranty a shucked drive.

... which is why it's important to keep all the relevant hardware that came with said drive. I just put all my enclosures in a box. Once you get the hang of it, shucking a drive will result in no damage to the drive or the enclosure.

 

[Jailer]

... which is why it's important to keep all the relevant hardware that came with said drive. I just put all my enclosures in a box. Once you get the hang of it, shucking a drive will result in no damage to the drive or the enclosure.

Same thing here. If I have a failure it goes back in the enclosure and sent back. The warranty is only 2 years so after that time I can pitch the enclosures.

 

[Chris Moore]

Western Digital specifically announced [earlier this year?] that they would not warranty a shucked drive.

The last WD enclosures I shucked were actually very easy to open without leaving a mark. Seagate uses clips that break half the time and then they put foil tape on some parts. They are a real pain to shuck and I don't suggest it because there is a high likelyhood that the warranty will be voided. WD is actually pretty lenient on their warranty in my experience. Just need to save the enclosures like Constantin and Jailer said. I have two drives sent out for replacement right now.

 

[tomahawkeer]

I have generally had really good luck with Western Digital harddrives period, whether they were internals or externals. I had 6 of the WD 8TB externals, that I had used previously for mining burstcoin. When I started on the building of my freenas, I figured I could take them and use them in a ZFS2 array or what not, and use it to backup an old drobo direct attached, that I have shared on on my network.

After I started the build, I got the drives out, and realized that 2 of the 6 were basically dead. They either quit spinning up completely, or had developed bad sectors. At this time, they were all still in their enclosures. They were all out of warranty so I decided to shuck them all and retest. I then found another 2 drives that were bad.

So out of 6 total drives (all barely passed the warranty period) 2 are still usable. I had originally hoped to build the nas with them, now im very skeptical of building a nas based on my current good shucked drives, and really don't want to start dumping all the money into a bunch of new drives.

 

[subhuman]

I had 6 of the WD 8TB externals, that I had used previously for mining burstcoin....
...they were all still in their enclosures ...
...So out of 6 total drives (all barely passed the warranty period) 2 are still usable.

So, after more than a year of 24/7 use in an unventilated plastic enclosure, the cheapest class of consumer HDs on the market (externals) failed? IMO totally predictable outcome.