Question 1

When i plug it in to my computer via USB, it says there are 2 disks. I tried merging, extending etc in disk management, but everything i try says "operation not supported by object. Any way i can make the 2 disks into one? My computer and raspberry pi see it as a 2tb disk and a 1.68tb disk

Accepted Answer

I ran into this problem with my system. After Alot of testing there are a few things that you need to be aware. 1) for the hard drive must be formatted into a GPT partition table for it to be seen as one drive. 2) there is also a bios limitation to these sizes. Check to make sure your bios supports UEFI. You mentioned that you are using a USB to connect it to your system. Make sure the external USB has a external power supply.

Question 2

I'm considering WD Gold for use in a home Synology NAS system.  Would this be more appropriate than WD Black?  I've had good luck with WD drives.  It's between Red and Black because of the 5 yr warranty.

Accepted Answer

I've been running a pair of GOLD 4 TB drives in a Synology NAS (DSM 216j) for a little over a year. There are 4 fan modes and I am using the 3rd from the top (not as aggressive). This gives me 93 to 99 degree temperature of the drives and for me is a nice balance of noise vs. temperature. I can be more aggressive with the fan speed if I need to run the drives cooler. I don't know whether the RED or BLACK drives support TLER or RAFF, of the two TLER would be more important. The RED have a 3-year warranty, RED PRO & BLACK also have 5 year warranties.

I suppose the biggest question to ask is how you intend to use the drives. Mine are mostly for file-sharing now, but in the new DSM918+ they will be used more aggressively for Transcoding as well as an AV server for a media center and I will probably bump the cooling mode higher.

To protect the data, I am using Acronis True Image (my release is 2013 and works well with Windows 7) and I am storing the archives on other drives.

Question 3

Does this hard disk come with TLER enabled? What is the difference between this model and the "WD Re 4TB Datacenter Capacity Hard Disk Drive"?

Accepted Answer

The Ae (Gold) Series is meant for "cold storage" that still have the RAFF and TLER which makes them ideal for large storage arrays, but they do not focus on performance or endurance, instead it specializes in energy efficient cold storage.

They are rated for 60 TB per year workload vs 550 TB per year of the Re/Re+ drives. Special features include low heat, automatic spin-down intended to preserve data integrity over long periods of time. 3 year vs. 5 year warranty. Intended to replace older tape based backup solutions.

Question 4

Would you guys recommend this drive as a backup drive to my photos and 4K movies from my 2017 MacBook Pro?  I plan on buying an enclosing for it, and using it as an external drive.  Now I know this isn't what it's intended for (and that the WD Black is more suitable for desktop applications), but my main priority is to buy a drive with the highest long-term reliability possible, and I'm assuming that if I buy a drive that's intended to be used more rigorously than what I put it through, it'll prove to be more reliable and have a lesser chance of failure.  Also, money is not an option in my case if it means ensuring the greatest reliability in a drive, which is why I'm willing to shell out more for this than the black.  If you have any other recommendations for drives that are known to be as reliable as they come, let me know.  Thanks so much!

Accepted Answer

I have a 2-bay Synology DS216j that I've had for a little over a year, running DSM 6.0.2 with a pair of these 4TB WD GOLD Enterprise Class drives. The temperature of the drives varies between 93 and 99 degrees F. I use the Quiet Fan mode setting and if I want the drives cooler at the expense of some noise I can bump the settings up one or two levels.

It think more than anything is that without a reliable backup relying solely on hard drives is not the greatest bet to make. For that reason I use Acronis True Image 2013 (on my system since I am running Windows 7 SP1 64-bit) and that was the minimum release I needed in order to create (schedule) those backups. The archive file is stored on an internal drive on the computer (in fact several archive files). And those are copied over to stand-alone Expansion drives via USB-3 connections.

I just recently purchased a larger NAS DS918+ and will populate it with 4 of these drives using the SHM-2 scheme which will provide 12 TB of usable storage space. The newer NAS will allow me to do transcoding on the fly for playback on various devices through out the house.

I wanted the most reliable drive on the market and having about 14 months experience with the GOLD line continued to use it. FWIW, my oldest BLACK drive is now 8 years old and still working good (no issues). My oldest GREEN drive is 7 years old and again no issue. I've had some early issues with 7200 RPM Blue drives but to be fair it did last 6 years before it started to fail.

Western Digital has a rainbow of colors available for drives aimed at different markets. They folded the GREEN drives into the Blue Line which only adds confusion, and in the past they use AE (Cold Storage - data that does not change often), SE (Enterprise), RE (higher reliability of SE version & better warranty). I like that they are standardizing on GOLD and moving away from AE, SE, RE.

Having multiple backups (Acronis) of my valuable data helps me the most.

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