Tag: NAS

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Shucking a 8TB WD Elements vs 8TB WD Red

Shucking a hard drive is the practice of removing a hard drive from it’s (external) USB exclose. This may sound like a stupid thing to do, but this can save you some money (150 euro vs 220 euro) 🤑

  • Cracking the case
  • See what we got
  • Free the drive
  • Ready for use

The scary side of shucking is that you never really know what you will get, it is a little like a surprise egg for nerds. This time we got lucky, the WD80EMAZ is actually a helium filled HGST Ultrastar, modified to run at 5400 RPM (instead of 7200 RPM).

The shucked drive ( WD80EMAZ ) runs 5-6 degrees cooler than my original 8TB WD Red drives (WD80EFAX) 😎

Hard drive temperatures WD80EFAX (8TB WD Red) vs WD80EMAZ (Shunked 8TB WD Elements).

Update: I have multiple shucked drives in use WD80EMAZ (WD Elements with the blue text on the box) and WD80EDAZ (WD Elements with the orange text on the box). All drives have 256MB cache and are running without issues in a Synology NAS. The WD80EDAZ drives will run a lot hotter 😐

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Moved from a Linux server to a NAS…

One of my disk in my RAID6 array of my Linux server dropped from the disk array, so it was time to decide the future of my old and trusty server. I have been running a Linux server as my home storage for +15 years. But the family life is limiting my tinker time… So I decided to try an off-the-shelf storage solution (Synolog DiskStation DS918+), to see if this can serve my server needs, without the additional hassle of building and maintaining a Linux server.

Update: Currently I’m running the NAS with 2x8TB WD80EMAZ (WD Red) drives and 1x8TB WD80EMAZ ( shucked WD Elements) drive, with 2x250GB WD Black NVMe SSD’s as (read/write) cache.

Synology DS918+