Are WL drives any good?

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rkd29980

Limp Gawd
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Oct 19, 2015
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I have asked about them before but I am looking for more feed back on them.

Are these made by any of the big hard drive makers or are they made by another company altogether?

I see 6TB WL drives on ebay for $150 which would make them the cheapest 6TB drives on the market. My big concern is that they are only 5,700 RPM instead of 7,200 RPM and they only have a 64MB cache instead of a 128MB cache both of which affects file transfer/rebuild rates, right?

I need at least 60 5TB drives put prefer to get 90 6TB drives. My total hard drive budget is 10,000 so it seems WL may be my only option.
 
It depends on what you want them for.

WD green drives are meant for storage where speed is not a priority. They tend to "sleep" more than regular drives to save energy.

They are fine for say HTPC, but awful for databases.
 
Ask yourself if the possible loss of numerous drives a month would be a set back. If so, you shouldn't be looking at White Label drives which are often reject or previously failed drives.

For that many drives you must be dealing with some serious data. I wouldn't consider WL drives for this purpose.
 
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The WL drives are usually "refurbished" WD drives with a 1-year warranty from the seller. Sometimes they are "new" overstock from WD. In any case, the SMART data is zeroed out so you don't really know.

That said, the 5700rpm ones on eBay have been verified as WD REDs (they support CCTL/TLER). The seller has good customer service for drives that go bad.

From my experience with WL drives, you should consider them IF and only IF:

(a) you have the experience, time and equipment to severely stress test them during the 30-day return period -- this means a Linux system with multiple bays, multiple badblocks passes and the ability to use smartctl to monitor and weed out failing drives. A Linux desktop system is OK if you're only going to be testing 2-3 drives at a time.

(b) you understand that the lower price compared to WD drives is primarily because of the shorter warranty, i.e. you're saving on the 2 or 4 additional years of "insurance" WD charges for their warranty. Unlike normal drives, there is no guarantee the seller will be able to sell you a replacement drive after one year -- their stock varies. Thus, the trade-off for lower cost is self-insurance. It is therefore crucial to spend some of the savings on at least two "cold" spares on hand per RAID array (preferably non-WL drives) and to briefly test these spares at least once a month to make sure they are ready to be swapped in when a drive fails.

rkd29980 said:
I need at least 60 5TB drives put prefer to get 90 6TB drives. My total hard drive budget is 10,000 so it seems WL may be my only option.
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:eek: OK, I absolutely WOULD NOT recommend WL drives for this kind of deployment. You should also know that the WD Red drives are not specified for use in arrays of more than 8 drives.

If you're OK with 5TB drives, I'd recommend the Toshiba 5TB SATA 6Gb/s 7200rpm, 128MB Cache, 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive (PH3500U-1I72) on Amazon for $144.99, with 3-year warranty. Well reviewed for RAID use here in the SSD & Storage forum.

Even otherwise, for the quantity you want, you'll probably get a bulk discount, so ask around.

rkd29980 said:
My big concern is that they are only 5,700 RPM instead of 7,200 RPM and they only have a 64MB cache instead of a 128MB cache both of which affects file transfer/rebuild rates, right?
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If you will be doing mostly large sequential transfers (i.e. mostly large/media files), the cache difference doesn't matter. Also, file transfers and rebuild rates will be dictated primarily by your RAID controller, array type and the number of drives in the array. What kinds of arrays do you envision building with your 60-90 drives?

PS: On Amazon you'll also find a WL 6TB "7200 rpm Enterprise" drive. DO NOT BUY IT. It's actually a 6.3 TB WD Ae drive which spins at 5700rpm and is meant as an archive drive with a low workload limit. The odd size means you'll be forced to use 8TB drives as replacements if these drives become unavailable.
 
Thanks for all the input, very helpful.

90 drives seems like a lot but this is all for media/porn/misc file storage and game backups. I plan to have mirrored backups and keep 2 spares per zdev (6 per server) on hand which is why I need so many and buying 60-90 more drives will still leave me with empty bays in my servers of which I am sure to buy more of in the future.

So much porn!!! :p
 
rkd29980 said:
90 drives seems like a lot but this is all for media/porn/misc file storage and game backups. I plan to have mirrored backups and keep 2 spares per zdev (6 per server) on hand which is why I need so many and buying 60-90 more drives will still leave me with empty bays in my servers of which I am sure to buy more of in the future.
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Care to share some more details on the chassis you're using and your planned ZFS configuration?

The WL prices are only going to go down, not up, unless another flood strikes Thailand. If I were you and chose the WL drives, I'd build out ONE server first and see how that goes, instead of ordering 60-90 drives in bulk.
 
3x Supermicro 36-Bay Server CSE-847A-R1400LPB
1x Norco 24-Bay RPC-4224

I would need 126 (including spares) drives to fill my servers.

I plan on using one of the Supermicro's for my important media and have it mirrored on another Supermicro. Because the third Supermicro sustained damage to the front panel and bent the case, I don't trust it for anything important so I will use it for my porn and misc files. My Norco will be used for videos and game backups.
 
Microcenter has the 5TB Toshiba drives for $140. I just tried ordering 60 of them and they said they don't do bulk orders. Fuck them, I will never buy from them again. What part of "Shut up and take my money!" do they not understand. I hope their business fails.

I guess I will just have to wait for another price drop on Newegg or B&H, whenever that happens.
 
lol. The price went up on Amazon, a bunch of them must have just sold. Keep an eye out, they are usually between 140-145 on amazon. I don't know if there is an order limit though.
 
Amazon charges for shipping and tax so even if I use a friends Prime account they will still tax me and on an order of at lease $8000, I don't think so.
 
rkd29980 said:
Amazon charges for shipping and tax so even if I use a friends Prime account they will still tax me and on an order of at lease $8000, I don't think so.
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I agree completely with that. The Prime credit account gives 5% off which negates the tax and shipping is free, including returns of defective items. A 60 drive order is bound to have a few duds. But 9k CL on brand new accounts is probably rare. As you said, keeping an eye out on the other stores is good.
 
I have ordered plenty of WL drives from the seller I am pretty sure we are talking about and have had no issues with them... we have ordered tons of WL RE4 drives from them... and when I have had a drive fail they have replaced them without issue...

if this is just mass pr0n/backup/non-critical storage I see no reason to not use the WL reds personally... I would not use them in critical production though
 
FLECOM said:
we have ordered tons of WL RE4 drives from them...
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So quick question: to get RE4, do you explicitly order the ones that say RE4, or the ones that just say "Enterprise 7200rpm"? As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I ordered a 6TB 7200rpm "Enterprise-grade" from them recently and ended up with a 6.3TB WD Ae drive.
 
Have you heard of JDR micro? There are dozens of companies like these in silly valley that buy over stock or basically they buy the entire wherehouse of electronics at auctions. Then they split the stuff amongst many and sell them. What I had found was, many times they cost more than new. As this was before the Internet got as big as now and you can readily search for prices. Since smart values are zeroed out, that means refurbished. Also you have no idea what models they would be.. They only list capacity most of the time. There is a lot of money to be made in this and they are great at providing some warranty because of the profits they make. Also many times the stuff is supposed to be destroyed for insurance and tax purposes. These were usually shipped to china to be resold to unsuspecting asians but with the net and being able to put them on ebay and amazon and the like they are openly selling them. I have bought hundreds of drives from these guys when they thought they could not get much for them and sold them as it without any warranty.. I would swap parts and get half of them working and they were not for production machines. It was also how I learnt about network stuff..

The guys who test these are kids, not really techs and such.. They might have learnt stuff like I did.. But from what I think they get paid and how much they know, they just hook em up and see and either pass or fail them. Saving 25% for stuff like this is not really worth it.. I would expect at least 50% or more.. I really dont have much good to say about people buying these. Because they have driven prices way up.. For basically junk.. If brand new drives direct from the factory are hit and miss, these drives which are used, abused, refurbished and basically only disposable... Because why wont the factory themselves does not sell the drives if they had confidence in them? Like many of them do at their outlets.. Even selling them for peanuts would be a tax write off for the company hence they do it. Sometimes you get a whole bunch that were sent back from a data center for some reason like not what they can use, hence you get a nice deal.. But that is not what this is about. They are using loop holes to sell stuff that should not be sold in a hit or miss scenario. The people who buy them did not know much how the business and thought it was a good deal. Without knowing where the stuff came from. I was once at an auction and people were bidding more than new for years old equipment and furniture.. Just amazing.. Why did they not just go to frys and buy new then? The only good deal I saw where room full of equipment that was bid but not for people like me.. It also basically stopped me from buying stuff from these places. It seemed too much of a racket to fool naive ignorant people. And the people they are cheating is you. They end up paying a lot less in taxes while you have no such options and someone in that chain still makes a ton of money without actually giving you that good of a buy. Looking at the entire thing some might think it was a great deal for them.. But that is only short term. It has turned into just another tax loop hole scam at the expense of everyone.
 
izx said:
So quick question: to get RE4, do you explicitly order the ones that say RE4, or the ones that just say "Enterprise 7200rpm"? As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I ordered a 6TB 7200rpm "Enterprise-grade" from them recently and ended up with a 6.3TB WD Ae drive.
Click to expand...

we purchased the ones that said RE4 I think, but we are only buying 1 and 2 TB disks for the most part
 
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