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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

WD green disks, be aware

Gunleik Groven

Gunleik Groven

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Just recovered from a nightmareish experience with 2x 2TB WD MyBooks with the green disks inside.

Long story short:

Just stay away from them.
The reasons are too many to list and the experience (even though I had duplicates, but they were WD-Green duplicates) are too many to list

And the icing of the cake is that WD encrypts the content on the current MyBooks.

WD Green

Do not go there.

Just a friendly advice (and nope, I do not use Maverick...)
 
I had two just stop...

On different locations/computers/electricity

Both had a head die.
Fortunately they did not go bang-click-bang
And selfdestruct even further.
But there were no prewarning and both have been treated well.
Have gone through a semi-suicidal week, with the encryption as the icing of the cake.

On the USB3 to SATA board, there is an encryption chip which must correspond with the disk #
No way you can just pull out the disk and slam it into a computer or SATA reader, if the disk indeed starts and the board fucks up.

You are basically just fucked.

WD has gone out and warned about the combo with their external software, these disks and Maverick, but that was not the case for me.

I have heard from computershops afterwards, that these disks die at an alarming rate.

Recovery is NOT trivial or cheap.

Just get your data somewhere else ASAP.
 
I have a few WD Green drives now, running on Mavericks.. Hopefully I'll get lucky. They've been going good for a few years now.
 
I avoided them in general because they're slow... but I used them once in a raid6 array that I wanted to build super-cheap - and I regretted it - they had a very high failure rate (including 2 that showed up with enough problems that the array was not able to successfully add them).
 
Gunleik Groven said:
Just recovered from a nightmareish experience with 2x 2TB WD MyBooks with the green disks inside.
Click to expand...
The problem with the WD Green drives is that they spin down after X number of minutes. They were never intended for a data-intensive project like video editing, video capturing, or rendering.

The WD Black drives or the Enterprise series drives are the only ones I'd recommend for that. But I have a bunch of the Green drives for use around the house and in the office for light-duty applications and backup work. They're fine for that.

For digital editing, no. The Green series are cheap for a reason. And I would never, ever, ever trust WD enclosures -- they're just garbage, in my opinion. I only buy the bare drives and then put them in my own enclosures. Never a problem if the enclosure goes bad. And actual drive failures are actually quite rare -- knock on formica!
 
@Marc

All good!

There were circumstances at the time of recording that made the mybook drives the ones that could be bought.
They were inteneded just for temp storage until edit, and that is when they broke down.

Silly me did not know what was in the Book, and I agree about the WD cabinets.

It is a bit typical that I demand dual RAID 5 for productions I work on, but could not afford that myself, and got into shit...

Now, a couple of big boxes are on their way.
Too late to avoid the initial disaster, but soon enough to solve the rest.

best

And thanls
And giving out warnings like this... Of course it shows off ones own bad choices in an embarassing way.

I still think the warning is more important than my embarrassment...

G
 
I just use the WD RED in my raid. Made for NAS and raid. They work fine.
 
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I have used WD green drives exclusively for a few years, I'm up to about 100TB now, never a single failure.

But I never use MyBook or other cheap enclosures, I tend to put them in the Mac Pro as if it were a tape in the old days. Projects, done and the drive goes on the shelf. I often have to pull data off at a later date, never a single issue mounting them.

Currently using the 3TB green drives. I keep redundant backups so as long as two don't die at the same moment I think I'm okay. I also keep ProRes final masters of my projects off-site.

One day I might wake up and all the drives are dead. I accept that as a possibility...
 
What is Maverick?

People look at me strange when I say I want to backup stuff to bluray (not for high data rate filming of course) to avoid issues like this. People had better wake up, we need a much higher density recording format for archival.

If we want to use a hard disks then we need an open disk format, where the disk format and heads are always standardized. Second heads can be in units, the old head and particles taken out of circulation, new emergency recovery head can be installed through vacuum exchange module, and external direct circuit port. In this way, if your drive ever goes, for a few hundred dollers you can recover what you can and do the same job a $2000+ recover center would do.

Thanks


Wayne.
 
Yes stay away from WD Green drives. Their quality is very bad. I've since transferred all my data to WD Blue, Black, and Red drives. No significant issues with those so far. I do like the Black ones best. I feel the Red ones are too slow for the price, but hopefully they are more reliable than the Blue drives. The Blue drives are faster than the Red drives.
 
The most efficient way to prevent data loss isn't to add expensive recovery options to your drives (substantially increasing unit cost) but rather to select the right RAID configuration for your data and to implement a well structured backup protocol. I've used commodity drives on low value data arrays and never lost a byte of data even though I've replaced quite a few drives. I've never even needed to go to backups to recover data... RAID6 with a hot spare on a reputable vendor's hardware is a very reliable configuration when you don't have enterprise drives. Back that up with a near line backup array or tape and you will have a system that's robust enough that the highest data loss risk becomes site related (fire taking out your structure) and off-site options become the next step.
 
No raid can stop corruption, if anything you need two raids all of the stuff
 
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