I purchased a Synology DS925+ and installed some WD Red drives in it.
Within a very short time DSM reported two of the drives as having problems. Before I installed them in the Synology I did a Smart test on the drives and the result was 100%.
My questions are:
Does this happen a lot?
Is it because they are WD drives?
As it now seems that I need to buy new drives are there any real advantages in buying Synology drives? These are quite a bit more expensive and the only reason Synology seems to say they are better is that DSM can update the firmware.
As I’m new to Synology I’m quite shocked that the DSM would be reporting problems with the drives in such a short period of time.
If the Synology drives are more reliable I don’t really get why they only have a 3 year warranty the same as the drives they say are not reliable.
I also have no idea what the warranty replacement process is like. Are they quicker than other companies? In the UK WD drives now all seem to come from the EU
I’m based in the UK and I’ve no idea if that makes any difference with Synology.
What type of WD Red’s are they? Do you have the full product name? (Red Plus vs Red Pro, size, etc.) and/or the full product # or SKU would be useful.
They’re not all equal. Among other differences, some are CMR (which is good). Other’s are SMR, which can cause issues with some RAID configurations.
If you’re able, see if there are any firmware updates available for the drives. To WD’s credit, they were able to resolve some of the issues that came with their SMR based drives. Though as a consumer, it’s hard to forget that they tried to hide all this when they first introduced these changes.
Also, there was a time that Synology tried to enforce their own branded drives as the only supported drives. Outside of their enterprise offerings, I thought they walked this back after consumer uproar.
Regardless, unless you like burning money, I would avoid Synology branded drives unless you have no choice.
Hopefully someone with more experience with Synology, and this particular model can chime in with more relevant advice
They are normal Red Plus drives, not the Pro version. I think Synology lists them as
wdc wd20efrx-68ax9no
but I’m as blind as a bat so that may be wrong.
I’m just really curious as to why they worked fine and got 100% Smart readings but apparently had problems soon after being installed in the Synology.
Sometimes DSM reports them as healthy but I always get an email that says
Storage Pool 1 degraded and was removed from the data scrubbing schedule. The storage pool will be added back to the schedule once it has been repaired.
And sometimes one of the drives just shows as not healthy and that two need replacing.
When I looked at new drives it appears that some people favour WD and others Seagate.
Although Synology let me use the reds in the NAS support made it clear that I only really get support if I buy Synology drives.
When I contacted support to ask what was wrong with the drives I was told that two need replacing due to errors. But I just don’t get how they can be healthy one minute and need replacing the next. I know drives can fail but two shortly after being installed and for no apparent reason that I can determine.
I could do with more space so I’m quite happy to upgrade to 4TB disks but I’m worried that new WD or Seagate disks will fail shortly after installing them.