WD Elements Desktop storage on RPI

[marty]

Hi, I am looking for an external disk for Linux raspberry pi media.
Specifically WD Elements Desktop Storage, 14 TB, WDBBKG0140HBK-AESN . Is
it noisy? Have any of you managed to get this drive to work on Linux,
and reformatted to ext4 or zfs? Not a sign from WD about Linux support.
Buying disk and enclosure separately is problematic as all enclosures I
have found limit the disk size to 8 or ten TB, probably for power supply
reasons.
--
Marty

[Martin Gregorie]

I've been using WD Elements 1GB and 2GB 3.5" USB-connected drives, each
formatted as a single ext4 partition, as backups for several years now,
under RedHat Fedora 35.

No problems at all: they just work.



--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

[marty]

Thanks for that. Reassuring.

--
Marty

[Theo]

Not on a Pi specifically, but I've used three of those* on x86 Linux and they
have been fine. They worked with ZFS, although with four drives in raidz2
it's a bit hard on the USB subsystem - I eventually removed them from the
enclosures and fitted them as SATA drives, where there's more bandwidth.
(if fitting as SATA you need to ensure there's no 3.3v power supplied on the
SATA power port - easiest is a 5.25" Molex to SATA power adapter)

Noise is OK - not silent, not loud, they make noise when seeking but it's
just a mild rumbling really. In raidz2 every noise is of all 4 drives
operating at the same time, which makes it louder than it is for one drive.

You don't need 'Linux support', you'll just have to reformat them and trash
the Windows software that comes preloaded on the drive, but that's useless
anyway.

Not sure why enclosures would be limited to 8 or 10TB, since there's no
limit at that point. Possibly they just never tested them with bigger
drives.

If using with a Pi, they have an external 12v PSU so you don't need the Pi
to power them, so should be good to go. If you have multiple drives the
5Gbps USB 3 port (~4 in real life) may become a bottleneck - not much you
can do about that.

Theo

* I couldn't vouch for the exact part numbers and they may change mechanism
between revisions - that one appears to be the Australian edition. It is
important to avoid SMR drives with ZFS, so I'd just confirm that WD
haven't sneaked in an SMR mechanism in the current version.

[Theo]

Theo <theom...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> * I couldn't vouch for the exact part numbers and they may change mechanism
> between revisions - that one appears to be the Australian edition. It is
> important to avoid SMR drives with ZFS, so I'd just confirm that WD
> haven't sneaked in an SMR mechanism in the current version.

I found the enclosure of one of mine, it's a 14TB WDBWLG0140HBK-XB.
I also have a WDBWLG012HBK-0B which is a 12TB version.

Theo

[NY]

"Theo" <theom...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote in message
news:TaC*Z7...@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk...

> If using with a Pi, they have an external 12v PSU so you don't need the Pi
> to power them, so should be good to go. If you have multiple drives the
> 5Gbps USB 3 port (~4 in real life) may become a bottleneck - not much you
> can do about that.

Slightly off-topic, but a cautionary tale...

If you use a USB-powered drive you should use a powered hub to power the
drive, rather than powering it from the Pi, because the latter with a
genuine Pi PSU may overload the PSU.

Fair enough, but... with a Pi 4 (as opposed to Pi 3 B+) you may find with
some hubs that the Pi will fail to boot: it hangs before displaying anything
diagnostic on screen until you unplug the USB hub from the Pi or the disc
from the hub, at which point booting continues as normal. This is even using
a specially-prepared USB cable that I had spare, which has its 5V line cut
(there were rumours that the Pi 4 doesn't like an external device to feed
power up the 5V line to the Pi. The same disc and hub worked fine with a Pi
3B+.

I had to change to a 5 1/4" SATA drive in a powered USB-SATA caddy: that
works fine. I imagine I could alternatively have used a 3 1/2" drive if I'd
had one of those spare.