Dismantling WD Elements to use the drive

eddie

Hi,

I am looking at assembling an external drive box for connection to a single PC.. ( lots of Cad and Hi res photo storage) so I dont need a fast system a sata drive is fine on USB3. The box is easy to source and I was looking @ 10 / 12 TB drives and they are little pricey.. but I can get much more reasonably WD Elements external drives with a 10 TB drive installed much cheaper..

Q> can I just rip the 10 TB drive out of these WD units and fit to my drive bay external box. ?

Thanks

Eddie

K.O.Kiki

If you're buying the WD Elements it's already external.

Why would you rip it out of the box and put it in another box?

ED E

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

If you're buying the WD Elements it's already external.

Why would you rip it out of the box and put it in another box?

What he's talking about (slightly unclearly) is a DAS. A NAS with USB3/Thunderbolt so that its dedicated to one machine.


OP the term you're looking for is "Shucking". See Reddit. Some drives have internal SATA, some are USB3 boards only so won't be any use in a DAS. Remember that some of those drives are White/Blue drives not designed for clustered use so if this is for your work buy RED or PURPLE drives.

K.O.Kiki

Thanks ED E, didn't realise "shucking" is a term either.

@OP
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/8ghb0o/wd_mybook_10tb_shucking/

eddie

Thanks Ed E I had not heard of that term "shucking" in that context before only with Oysters.

That is exactly what I was planning as the Elements unit is approx € 199 and the cheapest other 10 TB drive over € 300..

Appreciate you steering me in the right direction...

I am looking at Drobo 5D 10 bay ( allow for future ) box as they unlimited drive size, where my current 6 Bay Medasonic limited to 4 Tb per bay... any suggestions on boxes I would be interested.

Eddie

ED E

What level of fault tolerance?

eddie

ED E wrote: »

What level of fault tolerance?

I am not at all familiar with this, At the moment I have Zero Raid on 8 x 4 Tb drives and also now, no free space.. the enclosure capacity is 8 bays. I was not too worried as a lot of the information is of historical interest only.. all of the critical information is duplicated with another set on a backup system.

I would like to retain all I have 32 TB and increase storage by approx 50%. to approx 50TB overall. I also understand that whatever raid level or disk protection level I choose will impact on overall storage so will need approx 80-90TB for a 50 Tb raid 6 on single DAS

I do not need it on a network it is only accessed from the one workstation.

I also have 5-6 4Tb WD ELement style external drives.

My plan was to get a new DAS 8-10 bay and populate with the shucked element units and maybe 2 new 10TB units, raid that unit and then transfer some files from old Mediasonic unit and then raid that unit as well.

Because of the number of drives and to allow for decent protection I assumed Raid 6 on both when fully configured.

It would have been nice to have one new 10 bat unit x 10 TP drives but that is way out of my budget and I really need to re use by 4TP units to maximise the investment in them.

As is well obvious my now - this is NOT my area of expertise and would welcome and thoughts or insight.

Eddie

ED E

You've definitely done a bit of homework on it. Great to see.

The Mediasonic you have now is an "Enclosure" not a DAS really. Power+Cables+Fans, no smart gubbins.

I am looking at Drobo 5D 10 bay ( allow for future )

The 5D is a 5 bay. As are the C and T variants. Not sure Drobo make a 10, only 8 eights?

Anyways the difference here is all the RAID/Pooling is done on device. That means that if Photoshop blue screens your machine the pool doesn't become corrupt like can happen with enclosures. Downside is when Drobo/Qnap/Syns die they can be a bit of a pain to replace to recover the array. Stories aren't common but those that arise can be nightmarish.

http://www.raid-calculator.com/default.aspx - You can use sites like this to work out your requirements

in Raid6 (advised) 8x 10TB would give you 60TB useable. Adding 2x more filling a 10 bay would bring you to 80TB useable.


I'm a hoarder too but you're into big numbers here. Any optimization that could be done with datasets? Dunno what CAD files are like for entropy but perhaps historical stuff could be run through some of the more modern compression algos to shrink your requirements? RAW photos won't give you much gain that way.


Drivestation ultra 10 is one of the few 10 bays but you buy that with drives it seems and will set you back 10k for 80TB :0


I suppose in this case enclosures are probably a better bet. Sorry this post is a little rambly. Two decent 5 bay enclosures, both over eSata(20% faster) could be a nice setup.

Are you using Intel/Windows software Raid?

eddie

ED E wrote: »

I'm a hoarder too but you're into big numbers here. Any optimization that could be done with datasets ? Dunno what CAD files are like for entropy but perhaps historical stuff could be run through some of the more modern compression also to shrink your requirements? RAW photos won't give you much gain that way.

Thanks for the comments.. Yes I think I really need to go through the data I have an reduce it and dump what I don’t really need and come up with smaller numbers.

I read a lot of problems with hardware raid as the implementation is proprietary and if a problem occurs you are device dependent for your solution. One user had 4 Drobbo's bricked over a period.

Is software raid and more or less useful than hardware raid, as if software raid is useful then the boxes for are lot less expensive.. ?

As I am using it only as occasional backup storage I have different demands than some users needing it continuously daily..

K.O.Kiki

Maybe look into cloud storage, e.g. Amazon AWS.

ED E

Software has its own headaches, they're just different ones.

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

Maybe look into cloud storage, e.g. Amazon AWS.

Even on glacier that'd be $$$$$$

smacl

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

Maybe look into cloud storage, e.g. Amazon AWS.

Uploading that amount of data to the cloud would take an exceptionally long time. e.g. assuming a continuous 10 mbps upload speed, 20tb will take about 8 months to upload, uninterrupted. I do a lot of work with big datasets, and posting SSDs around the place is the fasted way of transferring big files. Also worth remembering if you're archiving big data, hard drives don't last forever. Some of the Backblaze stats make for interesting reading. Cost wise, I've a cheap Midphase account (~€100 p/a from memory), that claims unlimited storage. Don't know how true this is but I've got ~6tb on it accessible via ftp at present.