WD Easystore 8 TB WD80EMAZ

[LoSx]

So I picked up quite a few WD Easystore drives and they have all turned out to be WD80EMAZ white drives. There were a great price at 140 (150 today). I can't get any info on these drives (not even from WD themselves). The only 8TB drives WD sells are red, purple and gold. These drives have 256MB cache and 5400 rpm so they seem to be exactly like the reds. Have TLER enabled etc and same firmware as the RED's. I guess my question is how safe do people think these are? I currently have 6 3tb HGST drives that have been running almost constantly minus some power outages for 5 years and 2 are starting to give me SMART errors on SMART 1: Read_Error_Rate one is 19 one is 300K. Not sure how that correlates but the drives have 44k+ hours on them.

Is it worth risking using these new wd drives and swapping them out one at a time until I get the raid for 12tb to 32tb usable? 6 disks in a raidz2. These are white drives and some people have has bad experience but I am trying to figure out if these are rebranded reds or what others would do? Obviously important data will be backed up.

 

[Chris Moore]

No, you should send them to me. ;-)

Seriously, they should be fine.

It is in my useful links in my signature, but I will copy it just to be extra clear:
Github repository for FreeNAS scripts, including disk burnin
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...for-freenas-scripts-including-disk-burnin.28/

 

[Jailer]

Burn them in and if they check out fine put them in service.

 

[rs225]

My understanding is they seem to be like reds, with some not spinning up if they receive 3.3V power, which can be masked off somehow.

The catch is probably that the warranty isn't valid unless they are in their original enclosure.

 

[rivey]

I just bought two of them yesterday at Best Buy for $150.00 each and when I shucked them, they were WD Red drives. I also got two of these last month and they were also reds. The key is to shuck them and save the plastic cases in case a return is necessary. The key is to test them and make sure they are working properly. There are some very good youtube videos on how to shuck them without breaking the case. Good Luck.

 

[Chris Moore]

The catch is probably that the warranty isn't valid unless they are in their original enclosure.

You can put the serial number from the drive in the WD website to check the warranty status. It has been reported that WD will honor the warranty even if they are not in the housing.

 

[Ericloewe]

You can put the serial number from the drive in the WD website to check the warranty status. It has been reported that WD will honor the warranty even if they are not in the housing.

Really? Most cases I've seen have the drives listed as OEM, so no warranty for the bare drive.

 

[LoSx]

Yeah I have gotten unlucky and looked at drive info before shucking and have gotten ALL whites from 3 different best buys and different serials so I think my area is out of reds :( which is why I was curious on the whites.

They have same size and firmware but hard to know.

 

[Chris Moore]

Really? Most cases I've seen have the drives listed as OEM, so no warranty for the bare drive.

Really, there have been reports of that. I'm not saying it's always true.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[Ericloewe]

What drives? The early 8TB Helium Reds that ended up in cheap consumer boxes?

 

[rivey]

I just entered the serial # of a drive I got yesterday (easystore with wd red drive), and the warranty shows as an easystore with a warranty to 8/2019. Not the warranty I would like but in my experience, if electronics work for the first few months, then they will probably go the distance. The easystore units with a model number of WDBCKA0080HBK-NESN so far have been the actual WD Reds. When I went into Best Buy yesterday, I just looked for the NESN on the medel and the made in Thailand and that has worked with four drives so far. I just wait till they are on sale for $149.00. Good Luck

 

[jblakeney]

Best Buy has 2 different models: WDBCKA0080HBK-NESN and WDBCKA0080HBK-NEBB. The NESN is on sale very frequently at different amounts (anywhere from $149 to $199). The NEBB appears to be an online model that I first saw on Black Friday. I just bought 6 more (NESN). There appear to be 2 different actual drive models in the NESN (I have not bought any of the NEBB models). There is a WD80EFAX model, a Red Label NAS drive. The other is WD80EMAZ which is a White Label drive, but appears in every way to be a red drive (TLER enabled, same firmware...) just a different label. All of mine were made in Thailand and have 256 MB cache. Running the badblocks scan now and the EMAZ white label is running a tad slower than the reds (5% or so) but that may be unrelated. These also all appear to be Helium drives from the smartctl extract:

Code:

 22 Helium_Level			0x0023   100   100   025	Pre-fail  Always	   -	   100

My warranty status also shows WD easystore Desktop expiring in 2 years not the 3 that a Red would typically have. I did take care in removing the drives and saving the enclosures if needed. You can easily test to see which model it is by running CrystalDiskInfo with the drive attached USB to a Windows workstation and it will provide the model number of the drive in the enclosure.

I have been happy with mine so far. I have 18 total now purchased over the last 3-6 months. I look at it as a way to buy Red Drives at about half price.

 

[anxman]

I just punched in the serial numbers from four freshly shucked WD80EMAZ drives from BestBuy. All show a warranty until September 2020.

 

[Chris Moore]

I just punched in the serial numbers from four freshly shucked WD80EMAZ drives from BestBuy. All show a warranty until September 2020.

That is great, if they honor the warranty. There have been mixed reports.

 

[xnaron]

LoSx, Now that you've been using the wd80emaz drives for almost a year how have they been? Any of them die or develop smart errors?
Thanks

 

[670739]

Same question regarding this white drives....

 

[Constantin]

For the WD external enclosures I've bought (easystore, Passport, Mybook, etc.) the serial number on the external enclosure and the internal drive is identical. So I'm not surprised that the WD site reports them as valid drives with a warranty but it's entirely likely that WD expects them back inside a unblemished enclosure with a matching serial number if they fail.

So I'm storing my enclosures. The SATA / USB converter, screws, etc. are inside a anti-static baggie, the power supply and USB cable will fit inside the enclosure so the result is quite compact.

The good news re: easystore is that the tabs most likely to break during shucking are on the generic taco-shaped piece that is not laser-scribed like the piece that the USB port is home to. So you can break a enclosure or two before you get the hang of it and still have enough "tacos" left over to make WD happy by returning a seemingly complete (though surprisingly clean!) external hard drives.

Unfortunately, because the external cases are now laser-scribed it has become much harder to create a facsimile external case.... not saying it can't be done. But it's a lot harder for most of us to clear the previous etching cleanly and then replace it with the relevant content.

 

[670739]

For the WD external enclosures I've bought (easystore, Passport, Mybook, etc.) the serial number on the external enclosure and the internal drive is identical. So I'm not surprised that the WD site reports them as valid drives with a warranty but it's entirely likely that WD expects them back inside a unblemished enclosure with a matching serial number if they fail.

So I'm storing my enclosures. The SATA / USB converter, screws, etc. are inside a anti-static baggie, the power supply and USB cable will fit inside the enclosure so the result is quite compact.

The good news re: easystore is that the tabs most likely to break during shucking are on the generic taco-shaped piece that is not laser-scribed like the piece that the USB port is home to. So you can break a enclosure or two before you get the hang of it and still have enough "tacos" left over to make WD happy by returning a seemingly complete (though surprisingly clean!) external hard drives.

Unfortunately, because the external cases are now laser-scribed it has become much harder to create a facsimile external case.... not saying it can't be done. But it's a lot harder for most of us to clear the previous etching cleanly and then replace it with the relevant content.

Thanks for your reply, so from your experience how is this wd white hdds for a nas? are they reliable?

 

[Chris Moore]

The good news re: easystore is that the tabs most likely to break during shucking are on the generic taco-shaped piece that is not laser-scribed like the piece that the USB port is home to. So you can break a enclosure or two before you get the hang of it and still have enough "tacos" left over to make WD happy by returning a seemingly complete (though surprisingly clean!) external hard drives.

Here is a good video that describes the process of opening the case without breakage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NUiD18DoYo

 

[Constantin]

Thanks for your reply, so from your experience how is this wd white hdds for a nas? are they reliable?

I use the whites in my backup arrays. No issues so far re: reliability.

The only thing I ran into with them depends on use: If I put them in Oyen Digital mobius 5 enclosures (5-disk JM Micro hardware RAID5 array), the eSATA write performance of the array drops to laughable levels (10-16MB/s) but reads are normal at 200MB/s. Switch over to the USB3.0 interface and the read/write performance changes to 150MB/s or so. That didn’t happen with the previous 3TB drives but the workaround is simple enough.

Oyen has no idea why, i tried three different eSATA PM host adapters and two enclosures, so the issue seems to be the combination of drive & enclosure. I hate losing SMART error access and the slightly better performance of the eSATA interface in the past but I’ll use USB 3 for now.

Of the 10 used HGST He10 drives I bought for my NAS, one developed SMART errors and was replaced.