WD My Book Live and TrueNAS - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Southerner
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 06, 2022, 06:27:19 am
content: I have 3 of the Western Digital My Book Live NAS. Apparently I missed their discount to owners even though the program ends in a few days and they are not responding to my trouble ticket I find that I must come up with an alternative. It was suggested that I use TrueNAS and make my own Network Attached Storage server. That is what I would like to do but need a case and motherboard and power supply for it. I do not want a big tower the Synology 4 bay and the WD EX4100 are the size enclosure I would like to find and use. Are there any suggestions or sources for enclosures like that with power supplies that will run 4 NAS drives plus the motherboard and any usb attached devices (like a DVD drive if I need to install anything).I have been out of the game for a while so I do not know what motherboards would be out there but cheap and would fit into the smaller enclosure. Same thing for enclosures. I already have 2 WD 4TB NAS drives to use.Thank you for your help.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 06, 2022, 07:10:01 am
content: You can buy small NAS PC cases that have 4 hotswap bays on the front and are about the size of a larger shoe box. Due to these small size only fit the mini ATX boards (the smallest common ATX form factor) but you do still get 1 PCIe slot on it. You typically get a tiny ATX spec PSU included with the case (Just make sure it is a known brand).I can go find some photos of mine later. I bought such a case from some random EU web shop, put in in a 7th Gen i5 CPU and filled it up with 4 of the 4TB WD Red drives along with a 250GB NVME SSD as cache. The thing runs Unraid as the OS.Where things got tricky is when i tried to make it as quiet as possible too. So it involved modifying a giant CPU heatsink to fit inside it, 3D printed ducting to make the CPU fan do the job of the case and PSU fan. Working in these small form factor cases is also annoying because things are so tight and you often need to take things apart completely to get to some parts. Later on i also added in a SAS HBA card to expand the storage capability with external drives.Hotswap bays are not strictly required but are nice to have since in the case of a dead drive it allows easy swapping of a drive to start rebuilding the RAID as soon as possible without accidentally knocking out more drives or shutting down the machine by messing with cables inside. The OS is a matter of taste. You got TrueNas, FreeNas, Unraid..etcIf you need high performance the ZFS RAID is the way to go. If you want more resilience and easy expandability Unraid is the way to go. You can't easily resize ZFS and a corrupted ZFS array is difficult to recover. In Unraid you can just add any size drive to the array and simply have to recalculate parity data, if the Unraid array corrupts to the point of being unrecoverable you can still just take out drives one by one and read a normal linux partition on them, so you only loose data on drives that died, not the whole array. However due to this you don't get any RAID performance boost. Reading the array is only as fast as the read speed of a single drive while writing is only half the drive speed (but this can be boosted by the SSD cache). For most home use Unraid is typically still plenty fast enugh, but i would avoid it for a corporate environment with lots of concurrent users.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 06, 2022, 09:34:24 am
content: I think ZFS can use NAS disks, too, but I never try that feature.https://icesquare.com/wordpress/zfs-cluster-a-network-based-zfs-implementation/What exactly you don't like at the 3 WD MyBook you have, and why do you want to move the disks into a new enclosure?

author: Southerner
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 07, 2023, 07:35:16 am
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on April 06, 2022, 09:34:24 amI need to move my WD NAS to a new home because the 2TB drive (only 1) in my WD MyBook Live is because the drive is 10 years old and they do not last forever. I tried to take WD up on their trade in program and their phones were even saying that was still active and their web page also said it but when I finally got a live body they told me it had expired in August of last year and I was just out of luck. Because of that I bought a Buffalo Terastation 3020 with 4 drives 4tb each. I still need to move the data over and have not found a decent program that does that. All versions of Windows explorer I have tried all just stop after some length of time. It never finishes and never kicks an error it just stops as if it succeeded. I did try RoboCopy but it failed too. No the drive is not dead. I am still using the WD until I can get the data moved.Thank you for your help.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 07, 2023, 07:54:15 am
content: I'm not familiar with Buffalo Terastation 3020, and not using Windows any longer for many years now.No idea what software would be good to copy the data to the new storage, sorry.About the HDD life, from my experience if they survive for the first 1-2 years then they never fail, but you did a very good thing to buy a newer and larger storage. That Terstation looks great for a RAID array.You wrote you want tomovethe existing data to the new disks. At first, I would rather copy than move (move = copy then delete from the old place), just to make sure there are no hidden flaws with the new setup.

author: Southerner
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 07, 2023, 08:01:05 am
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on March 07, 2023, 07:54:15 amI actually meant copy not move. The result is about the same as once the Terestation is in operation and looking like it will not fail the WD MyBook Live will be pulled and placed on the shelf since WD says not to even use it on a network any more.Thank you.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 07, 2023, 10:36:06 am
content: Quote from: Southerner on March 07, 2023, 08:01:05 amDid they tell why?Interested to know since I have a WD ShareSpace that I still use for backup (offline only). My guess is that's because they are not providing any more security and/or firmware patches for their old WD units.

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 07, 2023, 11:50:43 am
content: You might look for an old HP Microserver on eBay. I have a couple of the Gen 7 running FreeNAS and they work well. The newer ones have faster processors, but even the Gen 7 is good enough for a NAS. I have an N36L and a N54L, can't really tell any difference.For copying the data, you can try not doing it all at once. I always have trouble with Explorer doing that. Try copying just 20 to 40 or so GB at a time. I use something called FreeFileSync. It works fine but I use a very old version, I don't know what it's like now.Do you know if your WD Red are the CMR type?

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 08, 2023, 08:55:30 am
content: The copy process getting stuck at some point can be a sign of a dying hard drive!Whenever hard drives have trouble reading something they start to internally retry the read operation many times, slowing things down massively. Then once that gives up the OS/drivers might decide to also retry the read a few times. This causes so much retries that the progress appears to pretty much stop. Sometimes i seen drives get so confused trying to read a damaged area that they completely lock up and stop responding, needing a power cycle to start working again.In these cases it is best to just manually copy off the data in sections(like a few root folders at a time). Then if you find a folder that makes the transfer speed grind to a halt, cancel it, write down the folder name and just continue with the next folder. That way you save the majority of good data while the drive is still working. It's clock might be ticking, that damaged area might be just moments away from causing a catastrophic head crash that kills the whole drive. So now that we got the easy to copy folders we try to dig into the bad folders, opening the folder and slowly copying its subfolders one by one until you find one that again grinds the process to a crawl, cancel, write down its name, continue...etc. Eventually you can drill down to just a few unreadable files that you have to kiss goodbye, or the drive gives up the ghost trying to read them. Main point is that you have saved the vast majority of the data.EDIT:Oh and SMR type HDDs can massively slow down write operations once you fill them past about 90% full. Or if they don't have TRIM enabled.

author: Southerner
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 09, 2023, 08:51:00 am
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on March 07, 2023, 10:36:06 amYes that was the reason WD gave for basically demanding that we stop using the WD My Book Live and the WD MyCloud immediately as they no longer support them and can not insure that they are secure and said they are not secure.

author: dobsonr741
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2023, 11:36:54 pm
content: Are the WD drives the external USB kind? TrueNAS needs internal drives. Some externals can be “shucked”, but not all has the proper SATA interface. Google “Shuck WD”

author: Southerner
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 26, 2023, 07:44:38 am
content: Quote from: dobsonr741 on April 04, 2023, 11:36:54 pmNo, the drives are internal and not usb. That is what makes it so hard as I can not just put in another drive. There used to be a drive image for setting up the WD Live drive. I wanted to go to a 4tb drive in the WD NAS but the biggest image I could find was 3tb. I think the 3tb image could be dropped on the drive and then some utility could be used to expand that partition but after Western Digital gave me the run around and refused to honor their user discount despite it still being posted on several of their web pages and on their auto message on the phone I went to the Buffalo. Now I just have to get the data onto the Buffalo. I did buy EaseUS copy utility and will try that.

author: 50ShadesOfDirt
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 26, 2023, 04:09:37 pm
content: There are zillions of tools out there, but for sync'ing vast amounts of data from A to B, I use DirSyncPro ... java-based, and is fairly simple. Install, analyze, sync ...You can delete A later, once DirSyncPro verifies that B matches ... Many other sync strategies in it as well.Hope this helps ...