WD Red compatibility ?

[davidjames1701]

Hi, I have four WD Red 3TB EFRX models in my DS 1019+ in Raid 5, I'd like to add a fifth HDD in the fifth slot to fill my NAS, would the latest model, a WD 3TB WD30 EFAX, still be compatible with my Raid 5 array ?

 

[microchip]

EFAX are SMR drives and I'd avoid them for a NAS

 

[bbunge]

I recently bought a Synology two drive NAS for a client as a package with drives. Had the option of WD or Seagate drives. I chose WD as I trust their reliability. The drives were SMR. After much research I learned that SMR drives seemed to only have issues with ZFS and Synology does not use that.
You should be OK with your WD drives.

 

[kamina]

I understood Synology removed them from the compatibility charts because they caused issues for users.

ZFS has serious issues, but thats not to say BTRFS does not - most of the sites investigating just used ext4 (no issues) or zfs (issues).

 

[microchip]

I recently bought a Synology two drive NAS for a client as a package with drives. Had the option of WD or Seagate drives. I chose WD as I trust their reliability. The drives were SMR. After much research I learned that SMR drives seemed to only have issues with ZFS and Synology does not use that.
You should be OK with your WD drives.

That's not true. SMR drives perform worse all over the charts, regardless of file systems. Especially writes can bring it to a halt. There's a lengthy article at Ars Technica that shows that

 

[davidjames1701]

Thanks guys, I understand the difference between CMR and SMR drives now, WD list their CMR and SMR drives, CMR seems the better choice, i used Raid 5 when i recently set up my DS, didn’t know anything about SHR, which i know know seems to have advantages like the use of different size drives etc, can i migrate from Raid 5 to SHR without loosing data ?

 

[bbunge]

With RAID 5 you should be able to replace the drives one at a time and allow the system to sync before doing the next. Start with your fail over spare then fail each drive in turn.
Still feel the SMR drives will be Ok for you.

 

[davidjames1701]

With RAID 5 you should be able to replace the drives one at a time and allow the system to rsync before doing the next. Start with your fail over spare then fail each drive in turn.
Still feel the SMR drives will be Ok for you.

ok thanks. I'll look into that