[SOLVED] Western Digital Red Plus drive for (only) Windows backups using Acronis True Image?

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andrepartthree

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Jan 1, 2014
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Hi folks :) ... well amazon sent me by mistake (instead of the hard drive I ordered), then told me to go ahead and keep, a 2 TB Western Digital Red Plus hard drive model number WD20EFZX here's the amazon link for it

https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Plus-Internal-Drive/dp/B08VH891FS

After doing my dance of joy over getting a free 2 TB hard drive I started wondering what would be the best use for it.. did some online research so I know it's best suited for a NAS environment (not sure what that is 😛 ) which is definitely not me I'm just a humble desktop PC home user , Windows 8 and Windows 10.

I know the speed is only 5400 rpm which is fine with me for the purpose I'm considering... I'd like to use it for backups of Windows 8 and Windows 10 (I dual boot off my PC, Win 8 and Win 10 each "live" on their own separate ssd drive) using Acronis True Image ... I do one of those backups per operating system for two backups total once every 2 to 3 months, sometimes once a month. On rare occasions I've been forced to use Acronis to restore Win 8 or Win 10 on my desktop PC if something goes wrong with either one of those operating systems. Definitely not installing Windows or any programs at all on it given the slow rpm and I really don't care if it's slow just as long as it works and lets Acronis restore my operating systems if I get into trouble! :) (the Acronis program itself is on a different drive, the same ssd drive Win 8 is is installed on aka the " C " drive, but I plan on telling Acronis to create the backup images themselves onto the WD Red drive).

My online research has turned up mixed results.. there are users who swear a wd red drive, despite being made primarily for NAS use, works just fine as a secondary hard drive but there are others like cat2devnull who feel it's a bad idea like in the post below here on tom's hardware forums

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/wd-red-nas-drive-for-normal-pc-use.3100440/

and then there's JPHapgood who said he used a WD red drive for four years for storage and he was happy with it

JBHapgood

forums.tomshardware.com forums.tomshardware.com

Also I should point out the label on the hard drive said it was manufactured July 2021 in Taiwan (which is impressive given the drought conditions those poor guys are having over there not to mention the coronavirus issues world wide) so practically hot off the presses so to speak if that makes a difference :) ...

Mainly I just want this to work reliably for being able to make backups of Windows using Acronis and to restore from said backups using Acronis.. Bad idea to use this hard drive? It fell into my lap for free so I'm REALLY wanting to take advantage of my good fortune here :) ... (though of course I feel guilty and awful for the poor amazon warehouse worker who's going to be in trouble over this now those poor guys get enough abuse as it is) ...

As an alternative if it would be better to just use it to store documents and files (not an operating system or program) instead of Acronis backups I could use it for that too, the secondary storage hard drive is starting to fail in my son's desktop (Windows 10) PC so I could just plop it in there. Thoughts anyone?

Thanks in advance to anyone who reads this and responds :) ...
 
Solution
USAFRet
The chance of encountering that particular fault at the exact moment you're also recovering an Acronis image are vanishingly small.

But this is also refers to the basic backup scenario of 3-2-1.
3 copies, on at least 2 different media, 1 of them offsite.
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USAFRet said:
No problem using a WD Red for any of those purposes.
None at all.
Click to expand...

Wow that was a really quick reply thanks USAFRet :) .. getting this kind of reply from a moderator on this forum is very reassuring too :) ...

I don't mean to sound ungrateful , obviously I'm coming here because I trust the guys on here to know a lot more about this stuff than I do not to mention I do appreciate your time and effort and attention :) .... but I was wondering, in this thread

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/wd-red-nas-drive-for-normal-pc-use.3100440/

when cat2devnull says

"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. "

This is what scares me 🙁 ... that while it's trying to recover Windows from an Acronis image backup it might come across a bad sector, say " nope I'm done with this " and then restoring from my backup doesn't work 🙁 ...
 
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I see .. and (slaps head) I just noticed the picture you have as a signature re: backups, instead of worrying I should just listen to you about this , you're a moderator and you're emphasizing the importance of backups so of course you would know about this sort of thing :) ... apologies for my stupidity and thanks again for all your time and attention this really reassures me and helps me out a lot :)
 
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