Replacement HDD drive for HDR-Fox-T2

[Steve13]

I've got a spare Western Digital Red 4TB NAS HDD (WD40EFRX) and would like to know if this would be suitable to go in my Humax HDR-Fox-T2?
I currently use the stock Seagate Pipeline HD 5900.2 1TB (ST31000424CS)
The only difference that I can see is that the existing Seagate HDD rpm is 5900 with 16mb Cache and the new WD HDD rpm is 5400 with 64mb Cache.
The current drive says's it's designed for survellance/video whereas the new drive I have is designed for NAS, not sure if this really means much to our application?

I don't want to install it if it might make the box unstable or not be fast enough for dual recordings, but if it is suitable it would be great to expand my capacity. I already use the custom firmware so the 4TB size wouldn't be an issue.

Any advise would be appreciated.

 

[Ezra Pound]

I think that the general answer is some drives don't work at all and others work but won't last as long one purposely designed / selected for the job, you'll probably find your 'Red' falls into the second category

 

[MartinLiddle]

The current drive says's it's designed for survellance/video whereas the new drive I have is designed for NAS, not sure if this really means much to our application?

The key difference is that a drive designed for a NAS will make data integrity a top priority whilst a drive optimised for a PVR will make smooth playback a higher priority than data integrity. Hence you might expect that the NAS drive will occasionally give stuttering playback as it makes multiple attempts to read a marginal sector.

I don't want to install it if it might make the box unstable or not be fast enough for dual recordings

It will certainly be fast enough and I don't see why it should make the box unstable. As you have the drive lying around then give it a try and come back and report on how well it works. There have certainly been other people that have stated they were going fit NAS drives but I don't recollect any long term reports on whether it was a success or failure.

 

[MymsMan]

AFAIK the difference between NAS and Video disks is in firmware settings for things like error handling rather than any fundamental hardware differences,
so I would think that it should be possible to change the disk firmware from NAS mode to PVR.

I don't know if anyone had tried it but if you Google 'Update disk firmware settings' you get instructions for various disks so I wonder if you could install the firmware for the closest equivalent video disk type. Of course you do risk ending up with a 4GB door stop if it goes wrong.

 

[/df]

Although WD's documentation of their products is utterly hopeless (surely no-one would buy an "Enterprise" product with such poor support?), this review suggests that WD40EFRX may support the NCQ and streaming SATA command extensions (similar to the Seagate Pipeline). But it may depend on the disk firmware version.

In any case no-one has reported a disk failing through lack of these extensions, so the software apparently works around it (perhaps with the results suggested by Martin above).

 

[aw1]

A significant feature of WD RED NAS drives is that they use Time Limited Error Recovery which fails a read or write that does not complete within 7 seconds, so that the hardware or software RAID mechanism does not time out and fail the disk causing it to drop out of the array, with the mechanism dealing with the resulting data transfer failure.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control
The wdtler utility may be able to disable this.
One could argue that this 7 second limit could be beneficial in a PVR.

I have 24 WD REDs (4 * 2 GB, 20 * 6 GB) in always on NAS boxes and they seem very reliable.

This one has been running for over 3 years

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAGS    VALUE WORST THRESH FAIL RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     POSR-K   200   200   051    -    0
  3 Spin_Up_Time            POS--K   170   170   021    -    4458
  4 Start_Stop_Count        -O--CK   100   100   000    -    29
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   PO--CK   200   200   140    -    0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         -OSR-K   200   200   000    -    0
  9 Power_On_Hours          -O--CK   059   059   000    -    30165
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        -O--CK   100   253   000    -    0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count -O--CK   100   253   000    -    0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       -O--CK   100   100   000    -    29
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count -O--CK   200   200   000    -    8
193 Load_Cycle_Count        -O--CK   200   200   000    -    410
194 Temperature_Celsius     -O---K   118   106   000    -    29
196 Reallocated_Event_Count -O--CK   200   200   000    -    0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  -O--CK   200   200   000    -    0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   ----CK   200   200   000    -    0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    -O--CK   200   200   000    -    0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   ---R--   200   200   000    -    0

and has these properties (NCQ yes, NCQ streaming no)

[root@hpnas /mnt/tank/unix/hpnas/smart/20191218_090900]# camcontrol identify /dev/ada0
pass0: <WDC WD20EFRX-68EUZN0 82.00A82> ACS-2 ATA SATA 3.x device
pass0: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)

protocol              ATA/ATAPI-9 SATA 3.x
device model          WDC WD20EFRX-68EUZN0
firmware revision     82.00A82
serial number         WD-WCC4M0SNYNRF
WWN                   50014ee20c44169f
cylinders             16383
heads                 16
sectors/track         63
sector size           logical 512, physical 4096, offset 0
LBA supported         268435455 sectors
LBA48 supported       3907029168 sectors
PIO supported         PIO4
DMA supported         WDMA2 UDMA6
media RPM             5400
Zoned-Device Commands no

Feature                      Support  Enabled   Value           Vendor
read ahead                     yes      yes
write cache                    yes      yes
flush cache                    yes      yes
overlap                        no
Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ)   no       no
Native Command Queuing (NCQ)   yes              32 tags
NCQ Queue Management           no
NCQ Streaming                  no
Receive & Send FPDMA Queued    no
SMART                          yes      yes
microcode download             yes      yes
security                       yes      no
power management               yes      yes
advanced power management      no       no
automatic acoustic management  no       no
media status notification      no       no
power-up in Standby            yes      no
write-read-verify              no       no
unload                         yes      yes
general purpose logging        yes      yes
free-fall                      no       no
Data Set Management (DSM/TRIM) no
Host Protected Area (HPA)      yes      no      3907029168/3907029168
HPA - Security                 no

Try the disk as-is (without the pain of running WD utilities on it) and see how you get on.

 

[/df]

Supposedly you can use an obscure smartctl command instead of a vendor utility to get/set TLER. Untested by me on HD/R, but the read syntax works on this Linux laptop.