So…for those who value their data and put in long hours…
I class myself in this category, and VERY disappointed to find that the ZimaCube has POSSIBLY fried 2 of my drives. The drives in the first two slots are now unresponsive and it has killed my dataset and therefore I have lost all my data. If only one drive had gone I could have recovered the data.
Any ideas as to why this happened? Drives are Western Digital Red (WDC_WD40EFPX). I already had to spend a fortune on new drives as I was aware that there were issues with Seagate Ironwolf drives so I didn’t use the ones I had. The drives are less than a few months old. I have yet to see if the drives work in an external caddy and will post back here if thats the case.
Very unhappy with the ZimaCube right now.
Additional:
Drives tested in external caddy - Unresponsive, so appear to be completely dead. I took the brave/stupid decision to try the 2 remaining drives in the same bays that the dead drives were in and they still work. So now that my initial annoyance has died down over these drives, I have contacted the store I purchased from and should hopefully be able to get them replaced.
Have to admit - don’t think I can tolerate any more drive failures. If it happens again then I’ll be returning the ZimaCube.
Just FYI, Red drives are notoriously bad. I’m not invalidating your experience, just adding that the Reds probably didn’t do you any favors. I had 4 Reds in an EX4. 3 of them died.
Great. I’ve spent a fair amount of money on the Zimacube itself, then upon finding I couldn’t use the Ironwolf drives I had spent money on new drives. And ofc I had to pick the worst to go with.
I took the last two that died back to Scan, and bought an extra one to take the drives up to 5. Didn’t want to populate the bay nearest the NVMEs to keep temps down. And now one of those three has died. I really can’t afford to be replacing drives every 2 minutes BUT if I was to get new drives, what is going to be most reliable?
Also - it does seem like pot luck as to whether WD drives work in the Zimacube; I’m seeing quite a few posts about them not being detected or dying. I did ask support at Icewhale when they were bringing out a new backplane for the drive bays so I could then use the Ironwolf drives, but not heard anything back as yet. In fact I haven’t heard anything AT ALL from them even with regard to the 2 drives failing.
My first NAS (Asustor) died, and now issues with this. At a loss quite frankly, and disappointed. I bought the Zimacube as its a fantastic device, but I don’t know if I can trust it now to work reliably to store my precious data. Nor WD Reds for that matter.
Hopefully someone at support will get back to me and restore my faith in the brand.
Thank you very much for choosing zimacube. We have conducted extensive testing on WD Red drives, and in fact, the official manufacturer provided us with the devices for verification. Therefore, we are confident that the cube is compatible with WD Red drives and can be used for an extended period of time. However, there are indeed some compatibility issues with this generation of devices, and we will optimize them in the next generation. Now it is under hardware validation and expected to roll out in Q4.If you’re interested, you can send me a private message with your email address, and we’ll make a note so we can notify you as soon as possible.
Then I must just be having bad luck.
I’ve never had this many drives fail in such a short time. And I honestly worry about my data integrity on this device currently.
When you mention new hardware in Q4, if that means a new backplane or hardware I can change in the existing machine then id be interested. However if you are talking about a new generation of Zimacube and I would need to rebuy…that would not be acceptable.
I will have the latest failed hdd replaced and give this another go, but if any more drives die then as far as im concerned that’s more than the norm and I would want this looked at or replaced.
I got 6 “manufacturer refurb” Seagate Exos X20 20TB drives from goHardDrive. However, since I’m in Canada, it made sense to buy from their Ebay store for a bit more protection on DOA or other issues. I wasn’t that pleased with how they were packed, but they all worked. I ran SMART diagnosis and turns out the none of the drives were even used (zero power hours). So probably purchased in bulk by a data center and returned the unused ones/resold as refurb. 20TB is not a small expense, even refurbs but I wanted to make my raid right from the beginning and not have to play with it later. I use Scrutiny to scan the SMART data (once a day I think) and the results have been very good thus far. I’m 1 year into these drive now. Even the NVME bay is fully populated (1 TB WD blacks) and I’ve not had any heat issues related to the closest drive bay. There are Exos drives available in smaller sizes. Be careful with the model numbers. I think the “Enterprise” versions may be SAS, not SATA.