Hi folks,
all over this forum one can find recommendations for (shucked) external hard drives, especially the WD My Book (Easystore, etc.). I’ve been asking myself if anyone here had bad experience with these drives with regard to the firmware they come shipped with? I shucked a 8TB WD My Book myself recently, which contains a WD80EZAZ that seems to be physically equivalent to an Ultrastar DC HC510 (He10). However, the firmware or rather firmware parameters of this drive obviously differ from the specs of a “raw” Ultrastar drive - TLER is deactivated, the rotation rate is lower at 5400 rpm, and I honestly don’t know what else is different.
Has anybody more detailed information or experience in this regard?
I have experienced no issues with the firmware they have on them.
My main 30 drive array and my other 8 drive array are entirely shucked 8-12TB drives, all working great.
2 Likes
I also use shucked drives, including EasyStore and My Book. I suspect the reason for drive parameters being set, such as slower rotation speed, is to make them usable in a small enclosure where heat dissipation is an issue. I do not work for WD or anything like that, so this is just intuitive guessing. From my own online research, I do believe they are Ultrastar Helium drives, and unRAID reports as such.
2 Likes
Many thanks for your feedback guys! 
Is it good practice to activate TLER on system startup or do you just throw the drive in and all fine? I could imagine a rather unpleasant system behavior if a drive, which does not support TLER or hasn’t yet activated it, becomes unresponsive (in particular in larger arrays > 8 drives – troubleshooting may be challenging).
I’ve read a great deal about this when I first got into servers and was wondering whether WD RED drives were worth the extra $$ vs shucking drives. After reading this post in the unRAID forums, I chose to simply disregard, shuck, and live.
Short update based on my research – when it comes to TLER I found this post at serverfault, which imho sums it up pretty straightforward: