WD Ae Hard Drives - Opinions Please?

[joeschmuck]

So I've never actually looked into the WD Ae hard drive line. Does anyone have the Pros vs. Cons list for these drives? I'm looking to purchase the 6TB model and NewEgg has a sale on these for the right price today. When I get to work this morning I plan to do some reasearch but I'm on a time crunch to figure if this is worth while or not for my use case which it mainly a backup for my computer systems and to store photos and run Plex and host video content (2 streams maximum but that is rare, BluRay quality not 4K).

Off the cuff I believe that these are slow drives which in itself isn't terrible but if true then that affects resilver times, it would be nice to know the maximum estimated time for this. Honestly I was hoping to buy 7200RPM 6TB drives to lower the resilver time on these larger drives but money means something to all of us when I'm buying a lot of hard drives (only four in this case).

So any specs/stats would be very helpful. Any opinions as well.

Thanks!

-Mark

 

[Linkman]

I was just getting ready to post that your 6TB HDDs had reached the magic price point of $160 :)

But I don't know how they compare. Will say that the "Features" section of the NewEgg page frequently uses the phrase "cold storage" when describing them.

 

[joeschmuck]

I have now done a bit of research on these WD Ae drives and honestly there is not much information about them. They were marketed specifically for data centers and to be sold in packs of 20 drives. Because these were not marketed at the consumer, well reviews are very difficult to locate.

From what I can tell they are basically built on a reliable mechanical platform and have a 3 year warranty. They have an odd magnetic recording format as compared to the typical hard drive however I don't see how that is nither good nor bad. When I compared the Ae to a Red then I saw some differences: 150MB/sec vs. 175MB/sec transfer rates, 300,000 Head Load Cycles vs. 600,000 Head Load Cycles, 500,000 MTBF vs. 1,000,000 MTBF. Additionally the drive size of a Ae is variable, it could be 6.1TB, 6.2TB, or 6.3TB and I don't think this is conducive to a ZFS pool and I think if anyone did purchase these drives, I'd ensure that if I got 6.3 TB drives that I'd pass the SWAP file to 6.1TB size just in case an RMA shiped me a 6.1TB drive.

So based on the fact that these drives are expected to sleep long periods of time and not spin 24/7, I'll have to pass on these drives. If someone who needs the extra storage but only uses the NAS once a day or so, maybe this is an option for them but I'm not going to be the first to step down this path.

 

[farmerpling2]

SMR is not meant for any random access active usage (e.g. RAID). They work best for write infrequently/read more frequently (i.e. backups). Some large data center firms are using them for near line usage.

Firms have talked about writing software to optimally use the write infrequently / read every now and then. They should be sleeping the majority of the time and come online in 15-20 seconds for reading then back to sleep.

HGST, Seagate and WD are the only manufacturers that make them currently.

Look for SMR for these companies as they all have documentation to some extent about their product.

 

[joeschmuck]

From what I've read the WD Ae drives are not SMR and I too jumped to that conclusion as well, but as I understand it the bit density is different from platter to platter which is why they make a 6TB drive but you could get a 6.1, 6.2, or 6.3TB drive in reality and as the technology matures it is expected to continue to go up, but I'm unsure how it's different and I could speculate but I would rather not speculate because I'd likely be wrong. It would be nice to see some actual data on what is going on here.

I kind of felt like WD was taking non-perfect platters and vice tossing them in the recycle bin that they use these platters in drives and use them offering lower capacities, but that is what I felt when reading some stuff on the internet. It's good for profit if you take a platter meant for an 8TB drive and if it has defects, map those out and call it a 6TB drive. There I go speculating on what was not clear in what I read.

Cheers!

EDIT: Looks like this external drive only has a 2 year warranty. Curious what the drives by serial number actually have.

 

[farmerpling2]

https://community.wd.com/t/wd-ae-datacenter-archive/138868

I ran across the above a while back. I thought it strange at the time, thinking it was SMR... You could be correct that it is not SMR. There is not a lot more about it out there...