Manufacturer Label: Mediamax
Model: WL4000GSA6472E
Equivalent to: WD4000FYYZ
eBay Seller: goharddrive
Price range: $134.99-144.99
Ebay link:
New 4TB 64MB Cache 7200RPM Enterprise Grade SATA 6 0Gb s 3 5" Hard Drive | eBay
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So I've ordered at least 120 of these drives now and they are currently in various burn-in stages and should go into production next week. After a few more weeks, assuming all goes well, we'll order another round. Overall, I am liking these drives so far and would recommend.
Testing:
We shoved all the drives in 36 bay Supermicro chassis and LSI 9280 cards and built out 3x12 disk RAID-0 configurations. From there, we would monitor the LSI card for errors as well as the system logs. For testing, we ran both a patrol scan on all the disks as well as a ---- badblocks -p 100 -w -v /dev/sdb ---- just to make the system do lots of reading and writing. If you have other good testing methodologies, feel free to tell me.
This process also prompted me to start documenting the tools that I am using and building more. They are available at: chuckleb/linuxdisktools · GitHub. It's a bit barren right now but I'll be writing up some in the next few weeks.
Reliability:
Of all the drives we have had, about 2 failed (dropped out of a RAID array) and 2 have media errors after about 4 days of testing. About 4 have shown signs of bus resets or unexpected sense errors, though I cannot attribute them directly to the drives. We've had a couple of slots on our test system that need to be re-validated. I would say about an overall ~4% failure rate out of the box, probably similar to any other vendor.
These drives are pairing up at 6Gb/s to the slots, have all the features of the RE drives, and the LSI cards like them. I've had dropouts using desktop drives and green drives on the LSI cards, this doesn't seem to happen.
The drives have a one-year warranty and the vendor is very willing to exchange, prepaid return label as well.
Pricing:
The prices have swung around in the past 2 months from a low of $135 to a current $145. This could be due to supply or they are just testing the market, but they have a large stock of them as far as I can tell. I suggest asking for a bulk discount. Credit card or Paypal only, they won't do a purchase order
Shipping:
They arrived well packaged, for small orders (<5 drives), they were in anti-static bags and wrapped in multiple layers of pink bubble-wrap. In the large orders, they were in the 20-pack drive boxes and also an interesting 32-drive box , all sealed nicely. The boxes all had adequate protection and nothing moved when we shook the boxes.
Seller communications:
Wonderful. Jackie is the rep that I have been working with and she's helped me bulk order as well as arrange for returns. Absolutely flawless support, answers questions clearly and prompt response.
Edit: 3 dead drives out of 125 so about 2.5% fail rate. All failed during initial tests.
Model: WL4000GSA6472E
Equivalent to: WD4000FYYZ
eBay Seller: goharddrive
Price range: $134.99-144.99
Ebay link:
New 4TB 64MB Cache 7200RPM Enterprise Grade SATA 6 0Gb s 3 5" Hard Drive | eBay
---
So I've ordered at least 120 of these drives now and they are currently in various burn-in stages and should go into production next week. After a few more weeks, assuming all goes well, we'll order another round. Overall, I am liking these drives so far and would recommend.
Testing:
We shoved all the drives in 36 bay Supermicro chassis and LSI 9280 cards and built out 3x12 disk RAID-0 configurations. From there, we would monitor the LSI card for errors as well as the system logs. For testing, we ran both a patrol scan on all the disks as well as a ---- badblocks -p 100 -w -v /dev/sdb ---- just to make the system do lots of reading and writing. If you have other good testing methodologies, feel free to tell me.
This process also prompted me to start documenting the tools that I am using and building more. They are available at: chuckleb/linuxdisktools · GitHub. It's a bit barren right now but I'll be writing up some in the next few weeks.
Reliability:
Of all the drives we have had, about 2 failed (dropped out of a RAID array) and 2 have media errors after about 4 days of testing. About 4 have shown signs of bus resets or unexpected sense errors, though I cannot attribute them directly to the drives. We've had a couple of slots on our test system that need to be re-validated. I would say about an overall ~4% failure rate out of the box, probably similar to any other vendor.
These drives are pairing up at 6Gb/s to the slots, have all the features of the RE drives, and the LSI cards like them. I've had dropouts using desktop drives and green drives on the LSI cards, this doesn't seem to happen.
The drives have a one-year warranty and the vendor is very willing to exchange, prepaid return label as well.
Pricing:
The prices have swung around in the past 2 months from a low of $135 to a current $145. This could be due to supply or they are just testing the market, but they have a large stock of them as far as I can tell. I suggest asking for a bulk discount. Credit card or Paypal only, they won't do a purchase order
Shipping:
They arrived well packaged, for small orders (<5 drives), they were in anti-static bags and wrapped in multiple layers of pink bubble-wrap. In the large orders, they were in the 20-pack drive boxes and also an interesting 32-drive box , all sealed nicely. The boxes all had adequate protection and nothing moved when we shook the boxes.
Seller communications:
Wonderful. Jackie is the rep that I have been working with and she's helped me bulk order as well as arrange for returns. Absolutely flawless support, answers questions clearly and prompt response.
Edit: 3 dead drives out of 125 so about 2.5% fail rate. All failed during initial tests.
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