Testing support for WD Red hard drive with Snyology NAS

Hi there

I tried to send the following to support as a pre-sales question but the onlind contact us form was just erroring. So I decided to ask the question in here. Would have preferred a proper e-mail us link.

What are the error checking options available if a WD Red hard drive encounters a problem when being used with a Synoology Diskstation NAS which is formatted to ext4?

Here is the background:
I have a Synology Disk Station 1512+, with 2x3TB disks in it and a DX510 5-bay device, which has 1 3TB disk used as a backup drive.

I was using a Seagate drive in my expansion bay and one day Synology reported that it had crashed. I could access the data on it but I wouldn’t use the timed backup software any more.

Synology suggested talking to Seagate. Seagate said I would need to run the error checking software. However it is only available for Windows. They also said they only supported their own NAS servers and I should change to their NASs if I wished to have support when using their hard disks. Although I have a PC laptop, I mainly use a MacBook and run Windows virtually.

The other issue I hit was the fact the drive was formatted in ext4, which Seagate’s software would not be able to read in Windows and my Macbook also couldn’t read either so I couldn’t use either of those to test it. If I formatted the drive, I’d lose the backup data and perhaps any chance of finding the cause of the problem.

One solution I thought of was to buy a WD Red and copy the data across. Then format the Seagate drive into a format Windows likes and run tests on it. I might not find out the cause of the problem by doing this but at least my backup data would be safe.

However if I was to buy a WD Red hard drive, probably the 3TB one, what would happen if a problem occurred with the drive in the future?

How would I be able to test a ext4 formatted hard drive? Do WD offer any solutions or is it simply a case of yes their drives work on a Synology NAS but if anything goes wrong WD are not interested in helping you daignose the problem.

Kind regards

Hello  infobleep,

Please see your personal messages.

Unfortunately I didn’t follow this up until now but I am about to.

I receive an e-mail from Western Digital employee who asked the me what my pre sales question was. I would have thought they would have been given that information in advance. I think from a company point of view it would make sense to share informationb between employees…

Once I’ve got further information on my pre sales question I will post it here so that more people have access to the information.