Not sure how useful this is to anyone in 2021, but I’ve been working on replacing some WD Sentinel DX4000 units that we’ve been using for around 8 years, and have now retired.
So, I had a DX4000 setup on my desk with it’s standard 2x 2TB drives, and 2 bays open, and a pile of new 10TB and 16TB drives destined for some new QNAPs.
As I’m taking one of the DX4000s that’s never been used home, I decided to see if it would pickup larger capacity drives, and to my surprise, it did.
The WD DX4000 that I installed the drives into has been setup using the latest 1.7.6.21 image, and has the drive enabler installed.
The drives that are installed are the original 2TB WD2009FYPX drives in bays 1 and 2, a 10TB WD102KRYZ (WD Gold) drive in bay 3, and a 16TB ST16000NE000 (Seagate Ironwolf Pro) in bay 4.
It does look like 3.5" drives have got a millimeter or so fatter in the last 8 years, as the two new drives were difficult to get in and out of the bays. The WD Gold was a better fit than the Seagate Ironwolf.
Now I’m thinking about picking up some 6TB or 8TB WD Red Plus drives for the unit I’ve taken home to see if I can do a recovery with 4 of those installed.
The disks I installed are out already, and my intention was only to see if they would be picked up by the DX4000.
We have several HDD docks which we use for cloning, and data recovery which will not read higher capacity drives (10TB+), so it was quite surprising that the DX4000 was able to.
Yesterday I placed an order on Amazon for 4x 6TB WD Red Plus drives which I plan to install into my DX4000 and run in RAID 5.
I chose the Red Plus as it uses CMR and not the SMR used by the slightly cheaper Red drives.
The choice of the 6TB capacity, was mainly because it suits my storage requirements (With RAID 5 I should have just over 16TiB of usable storage space. The other reason I chose the 6TB over the 8TB drive is that it spins at 5640RPM instead of 7200RPM and this reduces both noise and power consumption, while providing adequate performance.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to get the whitelist files edited correctly for them to work!
I use the large Obsidian 750D chassis with an extra cage to have 9 disk capacity so I can juggle a lot of disks as needed. I have a SATA card to add more ports.
Rack mounted rigs tend to have 6 or more disk bays depending on the model.
not sure if it is relevant but I already tried quite some time ago (there is a very old post) to use WD red 6Tb drives but they do not work in Raid5 (only two drives in Raid 1 work). It seems the maximum hard disk size the raid driver can manage is 4 Tb (i.e. total 12 Tb in Raid 5)
What is “the drive enabler”? This sounds like something I want to have!
I have two DX-4000 and also have 4x 6TB WD Gold (WD6002FRYZ) which I got accepted by updating the internal drive compatibility list, but sadly it wouldn’t build an 18TB RAID from them. My second DX4000 has 4x 4TB and it did build a 12TB Raid.
The Drive Enabler is a download available from WD that bypasses the whitelist allowing any drives to be installed. I think the main reason they released it was to allow rebuilds of failed drives onto newer models that were not in the whitelist.xml
