Western Digital 5TB Red Drives Preparation

[radian23]

I am preparing to put 5 Western Digital 5TB red drives in my NAS that I removed from Western Digital Element enclosures. I'm currently using the following to test the drives:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/how-to-hard-drive-burn-in-testing.21451/

Is it recommended that I update the drives firmware or make any setting changes to the drives prior to using them in my new freenas? Any idea what the current firmware should be?

 

[Bidule0hm]

No, personally I follow the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule with the firmwares, BIOS, ...

 

[philiplu]

I'm running burn-in on some WD Red 5TBs right now, basically following the same post you mentioned. A couple of changes:

• I didn't bother with the sysctl to change kern.geom.debugflags. Seems that's necessary if the drives are mounted, or GEOM is protecting the MBR, but those don't apply here (apparently). Anyway, I've never gotten the error that the debugflags is meant to work around, and the reporting/disks page shows the expected sequences of writes then reads (about 10 hours for each write or read pass).
• badblocks gives an error if the drive is too large because the number of blocks exceeds a 32-bit unsigned int. The fix is to specify a larger blocksize:
• Code:

  badblocks -vws -b4096 /dev/adaX

I didn't worry about firmware changes. I did run into my first DOA drive, unfortunately - one of the drives I got from NewEgg crapped out during the long SMART test, then hit a bunch of drive ready failures during badblocks, followed by the drive detaching and refusing to reattach. RMA took a couple weeks, and the new drive is about 60% through badblocks after successfully running short/conveyance/long SMART tests.

 

[radian23]

I just got another one of my drives in the mail today. I currently have 3 drives installed and they have been running badblocks for the last 30 hours.

Would it be possible to install my 4th drive while the computer is still on? Sata is hot swapable so I figured why not? Would it recognize /dev/ada3 without a reboot?

 

[philiplu]

Whether hot-swapping is safe or not depends on your hardware. See the discussion in this recent post - the connectors and backplanes involved have to be set up for hot-swapping. It's not enough that you're using SATA or SAS. In my case, I've got this SuperMicro 5-in-3 hot-swap bay, so I've been able to hot-swap my burn-in drives without powering down the server, but YMMV.

 

[DataKeeper]

If you don't have hot swap bays you will want to shutdown before installing new drives. I've made that mistake and firsthand experience... Don't do it! I'm lucky I had backups that worked.