They're massive beasts, with 9 platters and 18 heads, but enabling acoustics and power saving really helped on the seeking noise level.
Not sure how much of a performance hit that leads to though, haven't had time to fully investigate.
They run significantly cooler than the 8TB Reds tho, from ~45C down to ~30C in the same bays.
Do you know what's the approximate power draw (in Watts) of each drive with these settings enabled? I'd like to move to a lower power system sometime in the next year, but I'll also need to add some more drives. Power is extremely expensive where I live.
I wonder if the power saving features reduce the drive lifetimes (because of quicker spindowns)... might not be a good idea for an always on NAS.
I do not, but I could find out as I have a external SATA to USB adapter with separate 12V power. Check back in a day or so.
> I wonder if the power saving features reduce the drive lifetimes (because of quicker spindowns)
Ah, I enabled max power-saving without spindown. Most of my earlier HD failures, including a couple of WD Greens, taught me to avoid spinning down.
I tried running with both the power management set to "Level 128 - Minimum power usage without Standby (no spindown)" and Acoustics Managment to "Maximum", as well as "Disabled" for both. Didn't make a noticeable difference on power draw, at most 0.1A more during writes, primarily just noise.
Idle
5V 0.27A
12V 0.40A
Write
5V 0.53A
12V 0.50A
I didn't manage to test reads properly, since the disks are part of a ZFS pool and it spreads the reads all over, along with aggressive caching.
[1]: https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/us/storage/product/data-...
Read/Write – 6.2 W
Idle – 3.0 W
Standby and sleep - 0.8 W
For idle the datasheet says 4.53W typical, however I admit my disks were idle only for a few minutes when I did my readings as dinner was almost ready, so possible they would go lower after longer idle periods.
- the enterprise ones that are meant to sit in a datacenter. They offer the best performance but are noisy and power hungry.
- the SOHO ones, that are often 5400 rpm. They are lower performance but optimized for noise and power consumption.
I ended up with ST6000VN001 and the noise level is very reasonable.
And thanks to the better thermals, due to the helium, I can reduce fan speeds significantly as well.
For Linux it seems hdparm[1] is the way to go.
[1]: https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-reduce-hard-drive-s-acoustic-...
I have eight 3TB Reds, so far I've had two of those developing pending sectors after over 6 years of power-on time (no spindown), and of those one developed uncorrectable sectors a year later and I replaced it. The other one is chugging along happily so far with 27 pending sectors.
In the case of the WD Red, it went from pending sectors to failing SMART self tests in less than two weeks.
So yeah, disappointed about the short life span.