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[cherylC]

Using a NAS drive in a non-NAS (more specifically a non-RAID) environment is a really bad idea. One of the key differences is that NAS drives by default will have TLER (Time-Limited Error Recovery) enabled.
This is important because in a RAID environment you don't want the whole array pausing while one drive struggles to read one faulty sector. You want the drive to immediately give up and the array will recreate the damaged data from the other copy (RAID1) or parity (RAID5).
In a single drive desktop environment you absolutely want the drive to keep trying to get that data back because there is no redundancy.
So if you use a WD Red as a stand alone drive in a desktop and it has any issue then it is just going to give up and your data will be lost.
Now I believe that you may be able to find some software online that allows you to edit the firmware and disable TLER but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

 

[cherylC]

Quote <Using a NAS drive in a non-NAS (more specifically a non-RAID) environment is a really bad idea. One of the key differences is that NAS drives by default will have TLER (Time-Limited Error Recovery) enabled.
This is important because in a RAID environment you don't want the whole array pausing while one drive struggles to read one faulty sector. You want the drive to immediately give up and the array will recreate the damaged data from the other copy (RAID1) or parity (RAID5).
In a single drive desktop environment you absolutely want the drive to keep trying to get that data back because there is no redundancy.
So if you use a WD Red as a stand alone drive in a desktop and it has any issue then it is just going to give up and your data will be lost.
Now I believe that you may be able to find some software online that allows you to edit the firmware and disable TLER but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.> End Quote

I replied to this in another thread, but I think it was too old, so my response didn't go through.

So, I recently bought a 20TB WD RED Pro to use as a backup with my Acronis Backup software. Is it safe to use this drive for that, or is it still considered unreliable because of the TLER being enabled, like another user mentioned? Ideally, I'd love to set it up in a RAID configuration for a more secure backup in the future, once I figure that out. But for now, it'll be working solo.

I used to rely on external drives, but they were just too slow and inconvenient. Now I’m sticking with internal drives instead. Thanks for any help.