There are some HGST Ultrastar DC HC520 12TB SATA 6Gb 256MB 3.5" Enterprise HDD- HUH721212ALE601 drives on eBay for a good price.
These have the SED (Self Encrypting Drive) feature.
I don’t need the SED.
Will they still work as “normal” drives in the PR4100 with the latest OS5 release?
@delldsb nice question
UPDATE:
I bought 4 of the HGST Ultrastar DC HC520 12TB SATA 6Gb 256MB 3.5" Enterprise HDD- HUH721212ALE601 (with the SED feature) drives from the seller on eBay, and they seem to work just fine.
At first power up, the drive slot LEDs were all red, but the GUI said the drives were “GOOD”.
I created a 4 drive RAID5 with no problems.
The partitioning took about 45 mins, and the “parity consistency” scanning started automatically at the end of the partitioning process. And, the drive slot LED changed from red to blue.
The “Verifying RAID parity” is taking a while (about 10 min per 1%), but it shows there is 35.84TB of useable capacity and I can create shares.
Looks good (so far).
Note:
Each drive came with an adapter / extension cable and notes from WD about “Power Disable Mode Hard Drive” feature that these Helium drives support. It seems it can be an issue.
The Power Disable feature provides an easy way to power cycle a drive in order to perform a hard reset. This can be useful if a drive locks up for some reason and you don’t want to send a technician to the physical rack and manually “unplug the drive” and then “plug it back in” in order to power cycle the drive. It is mainly used on Server devices or NAS Storage.
If you are using the HDD on a desktop PC or Surveillance Devices, and the HDD is not power up. Please use the provided "SATA Power Extension Cable, it will fix the “Power Disable Mode” issue with the Host Device that doesn’t support “Power Disable” feature.
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I didn’t know that drives could “lock up”. That’s kind of worrisome.
I did not need to use the extension cable that came with each drive. I don’t know for a fact that all the drives spun up when I powered on the PR4100, but I know they are spinning now.
I do not have the Energy Saver > Drive Sleep option enabled, so they should never spin-down while the PR4100 is powered on.