Question 1

does the "RE" stand for re engineered or refurbished?? or does it stand for used in a server farm and swapped out after a set amount of time

Accepted Answer

RE stands for "RAID Edition". These disks are designed to wait longer before registering certain types of errors to prevent degrading a working RAID array.

If you're using RAID you'll want an RE disk like this, otherwise you might have a look at the WD Black series.

Question 2

Is this a good drive if you just want mega storage and just want to run one drive instead of 2 in raid?

Accepted Answer

Yes, it's a great drive. I have 30 of these, each set of 15 installed in a tower chassis, each configured in a RAID 6 volume, using the super fast 'LSI MegaRAID 9286-8E' RAID expansion card. Transferring files from these superfast volumes to my SSD local C: drive, I often exceed 1000MB/s transfer speed. That's 1.5 times faster than the SATA 3 theoretical speed. I bought these from Newegg between 2013 and '14, and only like 3 of them have died so far. WD has 5 years of warranty for you on each of these, and their RMA service is superfast, like the drives, lol. I'm running at the mouth now, but I've never been happier with a drive than this one. But alas, all drives like men, must die. And, WD will keep you good for 5 years. To answer the second part of your question; yes, a single 4 TB drive will give you plenty of storage, unless you're like me and have the obsessive hobby of collecting all the standard and high-definition tv series, movies and documentaries you can shake a stick at. Please do buy this, and you won't regret it.

Question 3

Is the 5-year warranty on these bare drives something WD recognizes?  Has anyone tried to register with WD and been denied?

On another site, people complained that WD told them there's no warranty unless you buy the drive with retail packaging.  That seems hard to believe.  (The other site is named after a large river in South America.)

Accepted Answer

This drive is our new storage workhorse. We have something close to 300 WD drives in-house, all of which were purchased as bare drives. Needless to say dealing with drive failures is not a foreign topic.

If you register the drive after purchasing and keep the receipt, WD will (usually) warranty it from the purchase date. Otherwise the warranty starts at the date of manufacture. We recently had an old 1TB RE drive that failed slightly past the 5-year manufacturing date. The drive was not registered with WD. Sending WD support an email with the invoice showing the failure occurred one week before the fifth anniversary of the manufacturing date produced an RMA and a replacement.

We have never had demands from Western Digital for original packaging (difficult when purchasing 20 drive multipacks!). Along with reliability, warranty support is the reason we use WD drives for SATA storage applications. Unlike their competitors, WD pre-ships a replacement drive before receiving the failed unit. This minimizes downtime, particularly if the drive had soft failures such as dropping out of a RAID array and throwing SMART errors.

Occasionally we have received a DOA replacement drive or one that died within a week. Western Digital overnighted replacements and picked up the return shipping.

I hate to sound like a shill for WD, but our experience with their enterprise drive RMA support has been consistently excellent for the past 15 years. I can't speak to how they handle the blue-series drives; we don't have any off them.

The only of our drives WD will not perform RMAs for are ones shipped with a system. For example, Dell uses WD for SATA drives in their servers. Warranties on these drives is only through Dell. Entering the drive serial number in WD's warranty registration checker how the full status.

Question 4

Is there a faster RPM available?  I have a 2T WD internal drive at 7200 RPM with 1.4TB of music on it and I have to wait to for it to access songs which seems like forever :)  TKS

Accepted Answer

If it's taking a long time to access a single song file, then there's something else wrong; it's not hard drive speed.  Even the slowest hard drive in the world should access a single file in less than the blink of an eye (no more than 20 ms).  A few other possibilities:

- The hard drive is overloaded with accessing many other files at the same time.  If you boot off this hard drive, then this is almost certainly caused by insufficient memory (RAM).

- The hard drive is defective.  Does the hard drive make weird clicking noises, or change its spin speed (the pitch of the audible whine coming from it) a lot, or produce errors at boot time?

- The delay is coming from somewhere else entirely.  Maybe your music playing software is slow, or you have insufficient memory (RAM) which makes the whole system slow.  Your computer should have an LED that shows hard drive activity; if it's going crazy, you need more RAM.

Try just copying a few small files off that hard drive for a true test of its access speed, and make sure the hard drive is idle first.

If the problem truly is hard drive speed, then a faster RPM will make little difference for small files; look into SSHD drives.  But, again, it seems extremely unlikely that this is your problem.

Question 5

is this a CMR or SMR drive?

Accepted Answer

According to my knowledge it use CMR

Question 6

What all comes in the packaging?

Accepted Answer

I stopped using WD drives due to reliability issues. But, as far as I know this is a bare drive.

Question 7

512E (Emulation) or 512N (Native) ???

Accepted Answer

I can't tell if its 512E or 512N unless you can point out an easy way to check.  I can see that it is indeed 512 byte hw_sector_size, logical_block_size, and physical_block_size from the perspective of Linux kernel 3.11.0.  I thought 512E was just a way to support 4k blocks?  My filesystem is ext4 and I'm using 4096 byte blocks there.

If you can think of a way I could check this for you I'll try and follow up.  Feel like I should know this.

Question 8

can shiping to Indonesia? How much the price shiping?

Accepted Answer

Hello, Thank you for contacting us in regards to your question. Please use the link below for International item availably and pricing. kb.newegg.com/Article/Index/12/3?id=1400 Thank you, Newegg Support

Question 9

How does the drive handle being shutdown daily?

Accepted Answer

I really can't answer your question from direct experience as I seldom shut down my four WD Re 4 TB drives - but I can give my opinion about frequent shutdown of server-class  and/or large desktop systems: don't do it.

This has been an ongoing discussion in the computer industry and I'm sure that many others could be found that can make a reasonable argument FOR shutting down systems on a regular basis.  And sometimes it's necessary to complete updates or software installation/removal.

I have never been a fan of shutting down and restarting computer systems repeatedly, especially daily.  In the 40 years I have been working with computers I would say that startup problems are one of the most common issues I have had to deal with.  There are certainly special circumstances that might require daily shutdown, such as maintaining security and/or limiting access or avoiding problems with unreliable power.  There are ways to deal with these problems that don't require turning off the system - security software, login-lockout times, backup power supplies, etc. but these may be impractical in your case.

Thermally induced stress is one of the primary failure modes for semiconductors .  Each time a system is powered down it eventually cools down to ambient temperature; when it's powered back up it goes back up to operating temperature.  As most materials expand when heated, this cyclic stress can induce failure.

I have been running four of these drives (WD Re 4TB Datacenter) for 18 months 24/7.  They are setup in a RAID5 array.

The system has been shut down a less than a dozen times, mostly to clean out filters, blow off the inevitable dust or to do other maintenance tasks.

Besides cyclic thermal stress, a key factor in hard drive life is operating temperature - nearly all the drive failures I have seen can be traced back to high operating temperatures, so I monitor my drive temps. and keep my filters clean.

This is more than you asked for...

wb

Question 10

So I see there are options for 512e and 512n and ultra 4k.... the 512n is cheapest....I google searched and have no idea what is the difference, other than 4k may be a thing in the future.

So, my question is.. I run Windows 10, and sometimes 7, will the cheaper drive the 512n, work? Why would i choose other drive options?

Accepted Answer

I hope this answers the 4K question...4K sector technology, uses the storage surface media more efficiently by combining data that would have been stored in eight 512-byte sectors into one single sector that is 4096 bytes (4 KiB) in length. If it were me I'd go with the cheaper one unless you have some reason why you'd need that efficiency, or can afford the other drive.

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