To be Wdidled or not to be on new WD Green 3TB HDD

[San Sun]

I am new to NAS and FreeNas. I attended the free NAS Intro class by Linda last weekend.

I am build a small (9TB) NAS for home use on a mITX board with SATA3 ports to store family pictures, video, some classic audio tracks and documents. I find the new WD 3TB Green (Model# WDBH2D0030HNC-NRSN) on sale in my local computer hardware store. Are they good to be used in a RAID5 ZFS ?

The WD Wdidle page states that this utility is designed to upgrade the firmware of the following hard drives: WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0, WD7500AYPS-01ZKB0, WD7501AYPS-01ZKB0.

So wondering weather the newer WD Greens may not to be Wdidled?
Appreciate if anyone please share their knowledge.

Thank you

 

[Jailer]

Yes you will want to run the wdidle3 utility on the new green drives.

 

[Ericloewe]

People have been having luck even with the latest batch of drives.

 

[jgreco]

We don't suggest "RAID5", which in ZFS is similar to RAIDZ1. This offers protection against a single disk failure, but if you lose a disk and then have any problems at all during the rebuild, your data is at risk. We suggest using RAIDZ2, which means adding an additional disk.

If you are planning to use 4 x 3TB disks, consider instead using 4 x 4TB disks which will give you 8TB of usable and more heavily protected storage. 3TB drives are a poor choice because the cost differential between the 3's and the 4's is relatively small, and the total cost of the storage appliance on a per-TB basis wipes out any "savings" you think you're getting.

If you put together a basic NAS platform for $500, and then add four 3TB drives at $90 each, in RAIDZ1 that gives you 9TB usable for $860, or $96/TB. In RAIDZ2, that's 6TB for $860, or $143/TB. But if you use 4TB disks in RAIDZ2, at $139 each, you get 8TB usable for $132/TB.

So the 4TB drives are actually cheaper than the 3TB drives when you look at the total capital outlay for the whole appliance.

Of course it's really tempting to go for that $96/TB, but it's a bad idea if you care about your data.

 

[San Sun]

Thank you for all the responses and I am quite new to NAS and so this is my first NAS and POC. I have one more 3TB drive sitting on the side. I can hook it up and make it RAIDZ2 as jgreco commented. How hard is that to move from RAID z1 to z2 ?
Currently I run in to an issue installing to my USB Stick. I have a 120GB SDD, should I install to the SDD drive instead?

 

[SweetAndLow]

Install to USB and moving from z1 to z2 requires that you destroy your pool and rebuild.