WL 4tb drives

[whitey]

OK, so I read the thread where a forum member (think is was chuckleb) had done some pretty extensive testing and was happy w/ these drives deeming them as solid to run in enterprise arrays. Found these over at 'theegg' @ $139 each and finally got tired of waiting for Ultrastar/Constellation ES, or the Toshiba SAS 4tb drives to come back down to reasonable prices and pulled the trigger on these. Ordered 4 as a trial run...hope I am not sorry. From what I understand these are WD RE drives.

WL 4TB 7200RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s (Enterprise Grade) 3.5" Hard Drive (For Server, RAID, NAS, DVR, Desktop PC) w/1 Year Warranty - Newegg.com

Thoughts/advise welcome :-D

 

[Patrick]

I did learn more about this recently, but need to confirm what I can share.

 

[whitey]

Ohh hell, please tell me I am not gonna be disappointed or you have bad news? :-(

 

[andrewbedia]

I've got a "WL" 2TB enterprise drive from goharddrive. never had problems with the drive or the seller. seller is very good about customer service.

 

[whitey]

Good to hear positive reports. Still interested in Patrick's findings/thoughts.

 

[RyC]

I've got a few of these 4TB WL drives from goharddrive as well. Had an issue with one, and they replaced it immediately. Been going fine since. I wonder what Patrick discovered

 

[HellDiverUK]

The Ultimate Hard Drive Test: What Hard Drive is Best?

Rubbish. Advertising Backblaze using pseudo-scientific figures.

 

[smccloud]

I'm still running my WL 2TB drives, although one has been flagged by my P410 as in pre-failure. Also been dropping out of the array a lot (RAID1).

 

[Patriot]

Curious as to what Patrick has to say about these WL drives.
Chuckleb seems to have the most experience with them.

Rubbish. Advertising Backblaze using pseudo-scientific figures.

I have seem them criticised time and time again... they have released their raw numbers if you wish to "correct" them.
They are very upfront with how they get their numbers...

Now... that would be a great topic for another thread.

 

[Chuckleb]

If the drive drops, I would replace it. I think the warranty depends on the drive, the WL RE ones I have they agreed to 1 year. Not sure which class the 2TBs you bought were.

I'm pretty comfy since the drives work. Over the next few years, they will get cycled out anyway. They really just have to survive for 2-3 years... because I need density. I'd prefer to buy drives without warranty and get cheaper/more since they will get swapped out.

 

[smccloud]

If the drive drops, I would replace it. I think the warranty depends on the drive, the WL RE ones I have they agreed to 1 year. Not sure which class the 2TBs you bought were.

I'm pretty comfy since the drives work. Over the next few years, they will get cycled out anyway. They really just have to survive for 2-3 years... because I need density. I'd prefer to buy drives without warranty and get cheaper/more since they will get swapped out.

Conversation started to not clog this thread.

 

[Entz]

I wonder what Patrick discovered

Indeed don't leave us hanging Patrick
I was thinking of ordering a few of these as well.

(My guess is the source of these drives?)

 

[whitey]

Indeed don't leave us hanging Patrick

Awww now he's just playing w/ our emotions right? Either that or keeping us on the edge of our seats. Come on Patrick, come out of super sleuth mode and tell us the good/bad/ugly. :-D

 

[whitey]

Well for better or worse they are in my norco 4224 ZFS AIO box. Migrated roughly 3 TB off of 4 1 TB Hitachi Ultrastars that are probably 7-8 years old configured in a raid-z on my old (retired as of today NL40) and onto the WL 4tb mirror set, felt confident enough in them to zfs destroy old filesystems :-D.

I live on the edge apparently for my media that is easily replaceable. So far seem to do roughly 150-160MB/sec w/ high level 10gb dd test

 

[cesmith9999]

now if there was a way to get white label WD RED...

 

[Chuckleb]

The 6 TB ones are I think.

 

[andrewbedia]

where are you seeing 6TB white label drives, @Chuckleb ?

 

[Patrick]

So just a note on the WL side. Basically when you send a "bad" hard drive into WD US, you are actually sending it to a recycler. That recycler tests the drive and from what I have heard, under some circumstances they can resell good drives that pass tests as WL. They also have equipment which can reset SMART data. These drives can then be resold to WL resellers. These WL drives can come from other sources as well.

I think we all knew that was happening all along, but a bit more insight into the process.

 

[smccloud]

Mine were OEM Hitachi drives.

 

[PigLover]

Patrick - just curious. I knew that the recyclers were allowed to atrach the 'recertified' label to drives they tested this way and use them for warranty replacements. Are you sure they also move them to the white label channel? My info was that the WL drives were sourced from the manufacturing subcontactor when the OEM didn't accept them (or sometimes from unauthorized productuon).