WD Blue Drives and Raid?

[Sean325]

First, let me preface by saying I did some searching, but came up with nothing.

Also, since it's relevant, here are my specs (albeit, ancient, but still works lol)

Athlon X2 4200+
4 gb Ram
Gigabyte M61P-S3
ThermalTake 550w PSU

Storage wise, well, this is why I'm here. I, up until recently, had two Seagate drives in mirror, and a 500gb as my boot drive. The 500gb was dieing and clicking, so I replaced that with a Samsung 840Pro - even though I won't be able to come close to utilizing the speed (yet - building a new computer hopefully within 6 mos).

Then I needed more space, so I added a WD Blue drive to my raid array and tried to start doing a RAID 5.

Well, as soon as I did that, the Boot Raid Utility started telling me one of my 5yo Seagate drives was heading to the crapper, so, then I bought a WD BLack drive to replace that (since they were on sale)...

Well, I shoulda just bought the black's only. BEcause, right away, I was having issues with the Blue. The Raid drivers wouldn't recognize it properly - it thought my 1tb drive was 2tb's. So, I changed the Windows Drivers back to the older version, and rebuilt the array in the BIOS tool.

About a week ago, the WD drive was giving me an error, so I removed it from the arry and basically used my "compromised" array for a few days to check the WD BLUE drive. It tested fine - but now, even though my BIOS utility says the WD BLUE drive is part of my array.... I can format a 1tb drive in Windows??

I'm so freaking confused by this thing.

HEre's what I'm asking - is the WD Blue drive the source of all my confusion? I read that this thing should work in Raid Arrays, but it doesn't always. Of course, my return window with Amazon is passed so I have a 4 week old WD Blue drive that I pretty much don't want.


Advice and insight appreciated!

Thanks,
Sean

 

[pauldun170]

Blues are not designed for raid and are missing some features (tler, other crap I can't remember) for RAID implementation. Controller will think something is amiss.

WD Blacks handle things differently and they will work in some raid setups, even though they are not specifically designed for RAID.
WD Blacks are good like that.

 

[Sean325]

THat's kinda what I was gathering. But, I saw lots of reviews where people were able to raid them successfully. I guess the point is - it's hit or miss.

Well, I'll replace it with another Black I guess. Gotta figure out what to do with this 1 month old blue drive now lol

 

[BrightCandle]

The whole point of RAID was that you can combine any set of disks into a combined array for the purpose of performance and data reliability. Blues will work just like any other hard drive.

Its not entirely clear to me what it is Western Digital do with their Reds that make them "better" for RAID. Once you can answer that question I suspect you know the answer to whether having a pair of blues or not is reasonable. If you can't answer it then its mostly BS to part good meaning people from their money.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Its not entirely clear to me what it is Western Digital do with their Reds that make them "better" for RAID

They have TLER, which is very nice if you're in hardware RAID, might be dubious value for software RAID.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Its not entirely clear to me what it is Western Digital do with their Reds that make them "better" for RAID.

TLER support and little else. In all likelihood they're mechanically identical to Green drives, with slightly different firmware. Just so that Western Digital can market them as an entirely different product line.

 

[daxzy]

TLER support and little else. In all likelihood they're mechanically identical to Green drives, with slightly different firmware. Just so that Western Digital can market them as an entirely different product line.

IIRC, the Red's have better vibration tolerance than the Greens.

BackBlaze did a blog about the drives they use. Basically green's were dying within hours due to their vibration sensitivity.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

The drives that just don’t work in our environment are Western Digital Green 3TB drives and Seagate LP (low power) 2TB drives. Both of these drives start accumulating errors as soon as they are put into production. We think this is related to vibration. The drives do somewhat better in the new low-vibration Backblaze Storage Pod, but still not well enough.

 

[npaladin-2000]

When you're doing RAID you really should be using identical drives. Some RAID controllers are a little more tolerant than others when it comes to drive matching, but it's usually better not to mix a Blue and a Black.

 

[Cerb]

TLER support and little else. In all likelihood they're mechanically identical to Green drives, with slightly different firmware. Just so that Western Digital can market them as an entirely different product line.

Also, they don't do any power saving nonsense when they aren't told to. However, due to low vibration and vibration tolerance, it wouldn't surprise me if the new Greens are more Reds with different firmware and/or lower-binned parts, than the other way around, as they are definitely quite similar.

Reds are basically low-vibration short-warranty slow REs, from a feature/performance standpoint. The cynic in my even has gotten to thinking that much of the aggressive power saving used in mainstream drives has been done specifically to make you buy the NAS/RAID drives for those purposes...

OP: like others, I'm thinking mixing drives that are too different is your primary problem. RAID 5 likely compounds the problem, as any parity RAID is a fairly fragile kind of RAID. Some software RAIDs can handle that no sweat, but not all SW or HW RAIDs will.

Getting 2 1-2TB drives, and making a RAID 10 out of it all, probably would have worked fine, or just replacing the 500GBs with a new RAID 1.

Since even the desktop Blues are doing their own power saving, I would look into a RAID 1/10 of Toshibas (formerly Hitachi), rather then spend on WD Blacks.

 

[Carson Dyle]

However, due to low vibration and vibration tolerance, it wouldn't surprise me if the new Greens are more Reds with different firmware and/or lower-binned parts, than the other way around, as they are definitely quite similar.

How could the firmware be tweaked to tolerate vibration? And if it could be, why wouldn't you just do it will all drives?

 

[Cerb]

How could the firmware be tweaked to tolerate vibration? And if it could be, why wouldn't you just do it will all drives?

Alone, I doubt it could be. Accelerometers would be a necessity, I would think. If the same drive had less ideally balanced platters or spindle motors, and/or lacked the same sensor (or possibly a DSP to work on the data quickly enough), the same result could be reached. It doesn't seem to be that it would make economic sense to R&D the drives completely separately, and it also would make sense in terms of time, given the Reds came out ASAP with 1TB platters at 5400 RPM, then the new Greens and AVs, and that they all have about the same, from a quick look, case and PCB.

 

[schmuckley]

Idk..but I was using 4X wd500 blues in raid 10 without any issues on AMD SB850/950.
The only reason i broke the array up was the price-gouging due to the floods.
Before that;I'd buy a new 500 blue every couple weeks for less then $50.
Still haven't bought new hdd since

 

[BFG10K]

How could the firmware be tweaked to tolerate vibration? And if it could be, why wouldn't you just do it will all drives?

Because not all drives have a hardware gyroscope to correct for vibration like a Red does.

 

[mikeymikec]

Because not all drives have a hardware gyroscope to correct for vibration like a Red does.

Huh. You learn something new every day!

Would I be correct in assuming that if I was buying a drive to use almost exclusively in a HDD docking bay that I should go for a WD Red rather than WD's other offerings?

 

[BFG10K]

Would I be correct in assuming that if I was buying a drive to use almost exclusively in a HDD docking bay that I should go for a WD Red rather than WD's other offerings?

Unless you plan on constantly moving the bay around while the HDD is reading and writing - or it's going to be extremely badly mounted - it probably doesn't matter.

The feature is more for NAS/enterprise situations where lots of drives add to the total vibration pool and can affect each other.

 

[Sean325]

Thanks for the feedback, guys. What was strange is my nVidia Raid Storage driver refused to recognize the WD Blue drive properly. Upon replacing it with the new WD Black drive that I bought, it has recognized it properly and I have rebuilt the array.

However...upon rebuilding it I seem to have lost all my data? Not a big deal, cause it was backed up. But, it's weird that when my RAID 5 was compromised, I could access my data all day. But, after rebuilding it, Windows just wanted me to intialize the new disk. Did I do something wrong? The Raid Storage software acted as if the rebuild was successful, so, not quite sure what to do here?

Oh, and my new black is making about 5x more noise than my current black. It's borderline annoying, as it's causing loud vibration noises to come out of my case. Think it's replaceable? I'm starting a new thread on it.

 

[mikeymikec]

I wouldn't trust desktop RAID to rebuild without me doing a backup first. From what I've seen (not much experience admittedly but some) it doesn't tend to ask "what should I be rebuilding from?". I suppose it could insist that all the other disks are blank and unpartitioned, then be trusted to do its thing.

 

[beginner99]

I would not bother with RAID 5/6 as a consumer. Just to much hassle and maintenance. And RAID 5 is basically obsolete anyway with 2 TB+ drives. Chances of the rebuild failing are pretty big. You would need RAID 6. The reason for this is that there is a certain rate at which errors occurs and with 2 Tb+ drives your basically guaranteed that one of the errors will break the parity of the RAID 5 and boom.

Now for RAID it depends. For software RAID you can use any drive. It doesn't really matter. The blue would work just fine.

 

[Cerb]

I wouldn't trust desktop RAID to rebuild without me doing a backup first.[/quoted]You should be doing backups, anyway. In the case of a home/SOHO NAS, it's common that the NAS is itself a backup. No RAID is a backup, and any RAID can fail to rebuild. Once you've sufficiently taken typical random drive failures, and UREs, into account, that doesn't mean there aren't quite a few more ways for it to fail--they're just all so rare that trying to prevent them in a single unit is not cost effective.
[quoted]From what I've seen (not much experience admittedly but some) it doesn't tend to ask "what should I be rebuilding from?". I suppose it could insist that all the other disks are blank and unpartitioned, then be trusted to do its thing.

With AMD and Intel, you generally have to tell it to rebuild. I don't recall much in the way of details, but it was pretty straight-forward, IIRC. Having replaced some onboard controllers with add-on cards, and solving SATA issues with single drives on nV chipset boards, I never got to the point of even trying nV's RAID--let them stick to video cards! Intel's also tends to fail hard, requiring downtime, when it encounters a problem (one of the reasons it's not as good as other options, if you're making a server). AMD's is frustrating to set up and manage, but works well enough, IME.

Now, some Windows software RAID, like the cheap SIL and Marvell cards have, usually based on Java...that stuff is total garbage.

 

[bradly1101]

I'm using two blues in RAID0 as my main storage drive. Not bad for $60 a pop.

 

[2is]

I've used all sorts of drives in a RAID array successfully. That said, I have had some drives that drop out of the array randomly and need to be rebuilt even though the drives were just fine.