I'm looking to upgrade my 2nd parity drive to max the capacity of my other parity drive.  So in looking for new 14T drives, I came across

MDD (MaxDigitalData?) brand that's pretty inexpensive.  There isn't too much here on MDD drives.  Has anyone had much experience good or bad with them?

This is what I saw on newegg..

https://www.newegg.com/p/1Z4-06MR-00017?Item=9SIA5ADKB31750

It's offered by GoHardDrive - I had poor interactions with them years ago and haven't given them another try. They had a horrible reputation for a very long time.  However, I've read relatively recent posts on SlickDeals where some people have said they have had no issues with GoHardDrive. Meh. In the past everything GoHardDrive offered was either reman or refurb. Don't know if that is still true.

I buy my harddrives (mostly enterprise) used from ServerPartsDeals. Outside of the occasional BlackFriday level sale WD sometimes has, I don't buy new drives (generally). I've purchased 10 drives so far (over the last 5 years) from SPD (all used), 1 failure that they promptly replaced (with a fraction of the hassle that I've had with WD or Seagate).

**ETA - 2 failures: 1 drive didn't pass preclear that they replaced without question. 1 drive failed at about 16 months (so still within SPD's warranty period), that SPD replaced promptly.  All without any of the hassle that I've had from WD or Seagate, and much more quickly. Seagate and WD each took almost a year to "close" an RMA (mark the failing drive as received and that the RMA was completed in accordance with their terms). Granted, that's the worst example I've had for either, but even the shortest experience still took probably 100 days to "resolve".
 

Edited September 12, 20241 yr by whipdancer

Well I did end up getting the MDD drive from Amazon..  We'll see so long it lasts.  It passed the preclear test and is currently serving parity

I just ordered an 18tb drive; got it today. considering the... mistrust... with these drives, I figured I would preclear it. So far, the one thing that strikes out at me is the fact that how the drive identifies itself to unraid does not correlate with ANYTHING on the label. this will be the 3rd 18tb drive in my sever... How do I identify it as the right one when it comes to replacement; besides process of elimination and trial ad error? (and watching the interface to make sure its the right one) Normally, its identified by model and serial in the interface. 

On 9/22/2024 at 4:33 AM, jbuszkie said:

Well I did end up getting the MDD drive from Amazon..  We'll see so long it lasts.  It passed the preclear test and is currently serving parity

Not sure if you're still monitoring this thread, but I've been eying these drives too - any thoughts on it after the past six months?

On 11/4/2024 at 8:05 PM, sunbound said:

I just ordered an 18tb drive; got it today. considering the... mistrust... with these drives, I figured I would preclear it. So far, the one thing that strikes out at me is the fact that how the drive identifies itself to unraid does not correlate with ANYTHING on the label. this will be the 3rd 18tb drive in my sever... How do I identify it as the right one when it comes to replacement; besides process of elimination and trial ad error? (and watching the interface to make sure its the right one) Normally, its identified by model and serial in the interface. 

I have a chassis with 36 drive bays and quickly realized that I wouldn't know which drive in Unraid correlated with their physical location.  Physical labeling of the drive caddies is possible but would be a bit of a pain (my handwriting isn't the greatest, and it would have to be updated every time I swapped a drive out).  My solution was to create an Excel spreadsheet with the grid layout of chassis.  I'd copy the drive identifier and put it into the corresponding cell as I added each drive in and it appeared in Unraid.  I have another sheet in that file with the fan layout, so that I know which fan corresponds to which fan controller channel, just in case I need to adjust fan curves or if one fan begins to drop its RPMs and needs to be replaced.

 

I'm not sure if your chassis or setup would be conducive to making a spreadsheet with the visual representation of your hard drives, but that would be an easy way to keep track of it, and to know which drive Unraid is referring to if replacement is needed for some reason.

11 hours ago, Ledgem said:

I wouldn't know which drive in Unraid correlated with their physical location.

This doesn't help when the system is off, but there is a plug-in for that called Disk Location in the apps where you can set the layout and assign drives to it and it'll show up like that in the dashboard. So if something happens with a drive, it'll show the location there.

I have only been buying the MDD SAS drives.  I bought two 13 TB on black Friday and they have been solid for last 4 months.  I also bought a 16 TB SAS MDD drive and it failed after about a week and a half.  I mean like completely dead, no recognition from the system.  I contacted MDD and they made it good.  Took about a week and half to get a replacement drive as I shipped back the defective one first.  The replacement has been in place for about two weeks now.  I also bought a 20 TB MDD SAS drive that I just installed today.  I will check back in on this post in a few months.  If you want a safer refurb option, I really like the Waterpanther DAS drives.  I probably have about 6-7 of those, and only had one fail within a few weeks.  Those were are SATA.  I did have another one fail recently,  just bad sector counts,  not total failure.  It was already 4.5 years old,  so I figure I got what I paid for out of it.  It was a 16 TB drive.

 

does anyone know the storage storage is written to the hard dive, is it sequential or Shingled? as this will be going into a NAS enveronment.

I had three of these go bad on me in under 7 months (all as my parity drive). I am done with them. Just ordered a new 12TB Toshiba N300 Pro to replace it.