WD Red 10TB poor quality

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Wader

New Member
Dec 16, 2015
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Purchased four new WD Red 10TB from B&H. Ran WD DLGDIAG on them and two turned up bad with "too many bad sectors". Swapped sata cables, swapped power cables, depopulated others drives... and they stayed "too many bad sectors". Still in the return period with B&H, so exchanged them. Two new drives arrived and passed DLGDIAG test. Built ZFS RAID10 array and copied over 12TB data. Two weeks later now and ZFS shows one failed disk. Isolated it to one of the two newest drives and found that at powerup it just starts clicking. Is not even being recognized as a SATA disk. Removed all the other drives and tried with all the other SATA cables and ports. No good on any. $!$#%, I decided not to go the "shuck 12T or 14T drives" because I wanted to make sure I had good NAS drives. Now I need to return this to WD and possibly get a refurbished drive.
This is a new build: Silverstone 800W PS, ASRock x570 Phantom Gaming X, Ryzen 3950, 64GB DDR4-3600, 4x m.2 SSDs. Cool environment with custom hdd heatsinks and good airflow for drives. Running at base clocks.
Is there anything I, or my motherboard could be doing to damage these drives?
 

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andrewbedia

Active Member
Jan 11, 2013
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I'm puzzled that you're using Windows tools to validate drives for ZFS (are you running the alpha builds of ZoW?) as opposed to badblocks or similar. What is the actual smart data output a la crystal disk info/hdsentinel/smartctl? Heatsinks on 5400RPM red drives is complete overkill as long as you have any amount of airflow. I'm guessing bad batch. No, your motherboard is not killing the drives.

I would just get a H310 or similar and get some used/white label SAS disks if you don't have low power/noise requirements. I've bought several dozen new and used drives over the past decade and honestly the success I've had with used drives has been emphatically better. I bought a dozen 4TB WD40EFRX drives brand new about half a decade ago and three were DOA (two immediately dead, one died during badblocks).
 

i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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I'm puzzled that you're using Windows tools to validate drives for ZFS (are you running the alpha builds of ZoW?) as opposed to badblocks or similar.
My guess: the wd tools are windows only?
Heatsinks on 5400RPM red drives is complete overkill as long as you have any amount of airflow.
The wd reds 8TB and larger, rotate at 7200rpm, wd calls it "5400rpm class" WD's '5400 RPM-Class' Drives Don't Necessarily Spin at That Speed
Is there anything I, or my motherboard could be doing to damage these drives?
"Bad sectors" are smart values that come from the controller on the hdd, I don't that cables have an Influence on this attribute
 

UhClem

just another Bozo on the bus
Jun 26, 2012
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WD sleaze on marketing documents (datasheets) and word-games (5400 RPM class) is bad enough, but blatant disregard/violation of the ATA Standards should lead to banishment [i.e. WD Red SATA NADA drives].
ATA_Rotate.jpg
 
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Wader

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Dec 16, 2015
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Hi. My video editing program is Windows only so I dual boot. Tested drive in Windows first using WD's application. After success there I boot into Ununtu for additional testing. Re heatsinks - I had 8 drives (Tosh 4TB) stacked in my case with about 1/4 gap between them. During the summer the operating environment temp was up to 100F, so just added heatsinks on the side to give more cooling surface area. Reduced temps 5+ degrees C.
I do have SAS controller cards but have always used SATA drives. This is a very lightly loaded home server and over the years have migrated from Z1 8x1TB WD Green to Z1 6x2TB Green to Z2 6x4TB Tosh NAS and now to R10 4x10TB Red+. Think I'll change that R10 to Z2 as now I am one disk failure away from losing the array. I have all data backed up on previous array as well as a 12TB ete
 

Wader

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Dec 16, 2015
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didn't mean to post that yet... All is backed up to a 12T USB drive that is kept at another location.
I'll take andrewbedia's advice on the next build and look into used SAS.
Thanks i386, I thought "bad sectors" could be flaky cabling.
 

andrewbedia

Active Member
Jan 11, 2013
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What temperatures are your drives actually running at? If they're constantly sitting over like 55C, I've seen a lot of drives die that way.
 

Wader

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Dec 16, 2015
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In the heat of midday several of the drives were over 55C, that is why I decided to add the heatsinks along with better airflow configuration to get the air over the hdd heatsink and not through other openings.
 

Wader

New Member
Dec 16, 2015
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Hi, Not a complicated heatsink, and no formal thermal analysis done beforehand. Simple off-the-shelf aluminum extrusion: 1" wide to fit on the sides of the drive; 6" long which is slightly longer than the drive, but the longer end is at the power/sata connector end so no interference; the extrusion base is about 1/8" thick, fins are 3/8 tall and there are 6 fins; machined out holes to line up with the disk mounting holes on the side. Ran a small bead of MX-4 thermal paste lengthwise between the screws and then screwed heatsinks on both sides. I used this size as it is the largest that would fit in my cases 5 1/4" wide disk bay. The space between fins is only 1/8", so you need to make sure there is enough air velocity to remove the heat.
 

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