WD Se? Any experience?

[Bairesman]

Hi there,
Looking for feedback on the WD Se 4TB for my NAS project. The are not too expensive and they come with 5 year warranty. I plan on buying 3 and run them in RAD1Z. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Martin

 

[joeschmuck]

My only opinion is they have a 5 year warranty which is good. As for the quantity you're buying which gives you 7.6TB of usable storage, well you need to think about what happens if you have a single drive failure. So one drive fails, and lets say you have 5TB of data on your system, now you order a new drive, it takes a few days to get to you, your data is at full risk of loss, now you get a new drive 3 days later if you're lucky, resilvering process starts up, and this could take a day or longer depending on how fast your system is. Remember one thing, if you have another drive failure of one of the original drives before resilvering completes, you have total data loss, no recovery at all. You need to understand the risks with a RAID-Z1 and maybe you are fine with that risk, it depends on what data you are putting on the NAS. I would recommend you think about a RAID-Z2 setup and run 4 or more drives. This gives you the safety of a 2 drive failure and you still retain your data.

Some of us have personal experience with this which is why I'm running six drives in a RAID-Z2 configuration. My drives are only 2TB because resilvering those will take less time so less of a risk. My only risk is I'm not using ECC RAM to which I'm planning on changing when I build my next system. If you don't run ECC RAM, run Memtest 86+ on your system for 3 complete passes. Then do this once a month or so to ensure you have no RAM issues.

 

[Bairesman]

Noted, to be honest with you I currently have all of my data on a HP EX495 and strictly run backups on a regular basis, to me that is the real safety net. That being said I would not have a NAS without some sort of RAID environment. As for the space I only have about 2TB of data that I really care about, the rest could even be in a volume without RAID, in fact I was going to ask whether there is a way to have a RAID-Z1 for my family pics, computer backups and maybe music. Then movies in a non-RAID environment.

Also I am looking at components from mobo to CPU and RAM only the ones that support ECC, just to be safe.