My experience with N7700 and WD 2TB Caviar Black

[crisp]

Hi all,

I've recently purchased the Thecus N7700 NAS with the idea of filling it with 2 TB disks. As probably some of you, I was very surprised to see these disks disappear from the list of supported harddisks. Despite all the issues I read here, I decided to risk purchasing Western Digital 2 TB disks anyway and see how it worked out for me (in case it didn't work, I could reuse them on a RAID controller I still have).Since there seem to be a lot of fuss on these 2 TB disks, I decided to share my (positive) experiences here so just that anybody considering buying the N7700 with 2TB disks, can also hear that sometimes it seems to work .

I used firmware 3.00.06 on the Thecus N7700 and put three Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB disks (WD2001FASS-00U0B with firmware 1.0) in RAID5. I created a master RAID, allocated 1% of space to it and distributed the remaining 99% capacity over three iSCSI volumes that I mount on a VMware vSphere 4 server. I used the out of the box configuration with "disk power management: OFF".

During the past three days, I have been continuously copying data to the disks, in three threads, totalling more than 9 TB of data copied. The disk load was the maximum I could attain, which is 60 MB/s write speed. I have pulled out disks and let the array rebuild (I had to stop the copy during the rebuild since the load of the copying prevented the rebuild from occuring -- this I consider to be a serious bug in the firmware!).

I did not encounter any problem at all, no arrays failed on me (except when I intentionally started pulling out disks). The speed are what I expect of them, so that makes me a happy, albeit unsupported, N7700 user!

I hope this also encourages Thecus to test the Caviar Black's (why only test consumer Green & Blue in all formats and not mid-market Caviar Black??? are you aiming at end-users or SMB's?) and put them on the compatibility list!

[ryusoma]

Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to sign up for your newsletter.

I'd like to see 1Tb Caviar Black disks added to the compatibility list as well as I need to populate a new N7700 shortly, and I am very reluctant to buy another large batch of Barracuda drives - I have had a 30% failure rate on 7200.11s, and now have already had a 7200.12 go south as well.

[philhu]

Thecus has actually openned themselves up for a HUGE class action suit for people who spent thousands on 2tb disks from the compatability list and then takes the disks off the list and say 'go buy other disks'

We purchased about 40 2tb disks WD RIGHT FROM THEIR LIST and bought a Thecus 7700 to test with. Never getting it working correctly with the 2tb Green disks. We ended up with DELL Wd1000 units. The last straw was DURING an EMAIL EXCHANGE on the disks failing with THECUS, the drives GOT PULLED OFF THEIR LISTS and they told us to go buy different disks.

So, instead of being out $18K for the drives, we bought 2 Dell MD1000 and run them in split mode (4 nas systems exposed). The drives have worked with only 2 drives out of the group failing hardware wise with WD replacing them no questions. The Dell units themselves are flawless..

So Thecus lost a sale of about 9 N7700SAS units, and we were seriously thinking of suing them, just for the satisfaction, but dropped the idea.

[crisp]

Hi ryusoma,

34 days have now passed without any issues with the WD 2TB disks in my system (low IO intensity). I am assuming now that, unless magically some bug pops up in the 3.x firmware of Thecus, everything is working fine. Don't sue me if your 1 TB Caviar Blacks don't end up working .


Philhu,

I would like to stress that the WD Caviar Black's were never on the HD compatibility list and that I (conciously) took the risk of purchasing a set of unsupported harddisks. I deliberately avoided the WD Green series because of their 5400 RPM spindle speed. The risk was actually quite low for me since I had a fallback plan that involves a Dell Perc 5i SAS controller (which allows connection of SATA disks) that currently runs my Seagate 7200.9, 7200.10 and 7200.11 series of disks.

Sidenote: like ryusoma, I have personally also experienced a 20% failure rate on my Seagate disks (out of 20 disks, 4 failed in the past 18 months -- after having RMA'd them and flashing to the latest firmware, now everything seems stable; however, now that the Seagate consumer disks no longer carry a 5 year warranty, I decided to shop for the best consumer/semi-professional disk I could find and at the time that was the WD Black... carrying a 5 year warranty which I will exercise in case of failure ).