NAS storage for Lightroom?

John from PA wrote in post #19061689
Risky, risky, risky!

In the "shucking" community you will find that indeed the Easystore drive often had a WD Red, or at least a drive bearing a red label inside. But most of what you find (comments, YouTube videos, etc.) is dated from 2017. Much of what you find today in the way of comments seem to indicate it no longer is a "Red" drive and WD may have gone to some lengths to prevent the bare drive being used out of its housing. If your drive power supply has a SATA power connector with all three voltages (5 wires on the connector), you need to remove the 3.3 v wire or use an IDE to SATA adapter, which has no 3.3 v wire. Although the discussion is for the 10TB Easystore, the nitty gritty of shucking the drive and finding out what is inside (most likely a WD White) can be found at https://www.servetheho​me.com …rnal-backup-drive-review/. The review points out that when comparing what they find inside against the WD Red there are a lot of similarities.

There are some reviews, comments, etc. that when you shuck the drive out of the Easystore enclosure that "less of a warranty" becomes no warranty.

For more pitfalls that may occur with the internals from Easystore drives on the shelf today, read https://forums.anandte​ch.com …king-hds-is-over.2497913/. It is possible you can end up with a drive that without some major work, may not operate at all.

Hey John, I'm a regular at Serve the Home and on the reddit DataHoarding community and I had read that article when it first came out. The general consensus in the data hoarding community is that these are their go to drives. Every time they go on sale there are multiple threads on both sites with folks ordering masses of them. There isn't any sense of it being risky at all. That linked article showed that performance b/w the shucked drives and WD Red drives were almost identical with the very minor performance difference possibly coming down to different controller hardware. They even summed up with:

If there were any issues with these drives the word would have been out a while ago. Heck, even Backblaze at one time was shucking drives. It's funny, the only drive I have have failed in the last 5 years was a 6TB WD Red and I haven't had a problem with any of the White label drives.

Regarding the 3.3v thing, that is just because WD is following the newest SATA 3.3 specifications which has a power disable feature in HD's. The most expensive drive I ever purchased was an Enterprise class drive that also had the 3.3v "issue". I have tried these Easystore drives in multiple computers and have only had the issue with one PSU and it was literally a 2 second fix. If a drive isn't powering up it's because the PSU is using legacy connectors, but it is super easy to fix.

Bcaps wrote in post #19061867
Hey John, I'm a regular at Serve the Home and on the reddit DataHoarding community and I had read that article when it first came out. The general consensus in the data hoarding community is that these are their go to drives. Every time they go on sale there are multiple threads on both sites with folks ordering masses of them. There isn't any sense of it being risky at all. That linked article showed that performance b/w the shucked drives and WD Red drives were almost identical with the very minor performance difference possibly coming down to different controller hardware. They even summed up with:

If there were any issues with these drives the word would have been out a while ago. Heck, even Backblaze at one time was shucking drives. It's funny, the only drive I have have failed in the last 5 years was a 6TB WD Red and I haven't had a problem with any of the White label drives.

Regarding the 3.3v thing, that is just because WD is following the newest SATA 3.3 specifications which has a power disable feature in HD's. The most expensive drive I ever purchased was an Enterprise class drive that also had the 3.3v "issue". I have tried these Easystore drives in multiple computers and have only had the issue with one PSU and it was literally a 2 second fix. If a drive isn't powering up it's because the PSU is using legacy connectors, but it is super easy to fix.

There are people here of all levels of computer skills so I just wanted to point out the pitfalls of shucking drives; absolutely nothing wrong with doing it, just know the potential problems. One of course being your original statement that they are WD Reds, but today they are far more likely to be the WD White. In addition it is possible that the warranty may be totally voided by the shucking operation. WD Reds have a three year warranty, the Everstore drives I think have two.

I wasn't expecting ANY warranty after shucking the drives honestly.

There have been a number of reports of people being able to return shucked drives, even without putting them back in the enclosure. Others have had issues but have also then had success when pointing out that under US law ( "Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (15 U.S.C. § 2301)") it is not legal to not accept the drive even if it had been removed from the enclosure. I have saved all of my shucked enclosures and boxes in case I need to do a return.

John from PA wrote in post #19061906
One of course being your original statement that they are WD Reds, but today they are far more likely to be the WD White. In addition it is possible that the warranty may be totally voided by the shucking operation. WD Reds have a three year warranty, the Everstore drives I think have two.

I probably could have stated it better but what I meant was that even though the shucked drive might be one of the white label and not red label, the whites are thought to possibly be rebadged reds, or if not, they are so close in performance as to not matter. The only real difference is the one year less warranty on the shucked drives. It is not legal to void the warranty of a shucked drive under the above mentioned law. There is a lot of info on this in the DataHoarder forum. BTW, congrats on your 10,000th post

Just as a FYI, for any drive you get I would recommend after confirming the drive isn't DOA and you put it into service, register the drive for warranty service on the drive manufacturers website. I have had drives that when I opened the box and registered the drive, the warranty start date was showing as the manufacturing date, which was almost a year before I purchased the drive. Usually you can just update that on the warranty website but when there is such a large discrepancy like that it may (it did for me) not allow me to update the warranty start date and I had to call or chat to get that sorted.

John from PA wrote in post #19061689
Risky, risky, risky!

In the "shucking" community you will find that indeed the Easystore drive often had a WD Red, or at least a drive bearing a red label inside. But most of what you find (comments, YouTube videos, etc.) is dated from 2017. Much of what you find today in the way of comments seem to indicate it no longer is a "Red" drive and WD may have gone to some lengths to prevent the bare drive being used out of its housing. If your drive power supply has a SATA power connector with all three voltages (5 wires on the connector), you need to remove the 3.3 v wire or use an IDE to SATA adapter, which has no 3.3 v wire. Although the discussion is for the 10TB Easystore, the nitty gritty of shucking the drive and finding out what is inside (most likely a WD White) can be found at https://www.servetheho​me.com …rnal-backup-drive-review/. The review points out that when comparing what they find inside against the WD Red there are a lot of similarities.

There are some reviews, comments, etc. that when you shuck the drive out of the Easystore enclosure that "less of a warranty" becomes no warranty.

For more pitfalls that may occur with the internals from Easystore drives on the shelf today, read https://forums.anandte​ch.com …king-hds-is-over.2497913/. It is possible you can end up with a drive that without some major work, may not operate at all.

Yes going to stick with the 2x6TB Seagate IronWolf (have used Seagate Baracuddas for the latter part of 20 years)--WD's used to suck and eventually get loud af). Anyway the "plan" is as follows until it blows up in my face:

1. Use the Adaptive Load Balancing to produce better throughput - I have non-managed switches.
2. Enable the Folder Synchronization on my LR Catalog (this will be a new test catalog to try out the concept). The Synology NAS has an setting to enforce an advanced consistency. I believe from reading up on it, you can have the file stored locally (on whatever computer). When that is open, you can enforce an exclusive access mode and the local file changes will force the change on the NAS side.
3. The synchronization allows you to also exclude sub-folder in the catalog. So in this case, that would be the previews folder
4. And it goes without saying that all of the RAW photo folders will reside on the NAS.

We'll see how that works out. If any of you guys see a "disaster" ahead using the concept, let me know. Like I said, it's a Proof of Concept for the time being until it proves out. No major changes to my workflow aside from some photos I can absorb losing a catalog integrity over.

~CD

Bcaps wrote in post #19061654
You might want to consider getting some WD Easystores, which are external drives and then removing the drives and putting those in your NAS. They are significantly cheaper (~ $130 for 8TB) and are very popular in theData Hoarding community as they are basically rebadged WD Red drives with less of a warranty. There are a number of videos on youtube showing you how to "shuck" or remove the drive from teh enclosure. I have shucked around 12 or so and it only takes a few minutes once you get the hang of it.

Which ever drive you go with try and confirm that they are CMR and not SMR drives if you are going to be setting up a RAID array. I believe for the WD's, you are safe at 8TB and above.

If you want to go this route, the EasyStore 10GB is on sale toay at BestBuy for $170. See https://www.bestbuy.co​m …k/6278208.p?sku​Id=6278208