Water Panther Drives

[Enquiries]

Hey NC,

This might be a neat video idea.

Background:
I have a Synology DS2415+ (12-bay tower) that I had filled with 10 TB Ironwolf drives (minus 2x 1TB SSDs for cache). As is expected, I started having a few failures over the years, and Seagate's RMA policy is to send the next higher capacity drive that is available in stock. For two of the occurrences, they sent 12 TB Ironwolf drives. This got me thinking, I want to think long term about expansion as my needs have grown, but I wasn't necessarily at the 'upgrade platform' stage at the time. I stumbled upon a new hard drive vendor (might be a re-label) called Water Panther. Usually their prices are very good compared to Seagate or WD, however I see prices have normalized a bit across the board. Water Panther occasionally lists refurbished drives that have deep discounts.

I purchased 3 Water Panther DAS SATA drives, which claim to be compatible with NetApp disk shelves, Synology RS and RX series, etc. I can attest that my Synology 2015 DS platform with an ARM processor is happy with them (green checkmarks).

Semi recently, I did upgrade my platform temporarily to a 2021 Rack Station RS2421+ when they were brand new, only to discover the show-stopping drive lock; didn't even like my Ironwolfs (yes, I saw your videos on that topic). I did see a video recently regarding the slight loosening of restrictions on non-Synology drives.

If you think it is worth your time, could you do a video on Water Panther drives and how some of the new platforms handle them?

I absolutely love the management, applications and functionality of Synology. I'm anxious to upgrade to a platform with 10G+, a better processor and is rack mountable, but I don't know what to expect when I bring these drives over even with the loosening of restrictions.

Use Case:
Mostly home user, massive Plex collection, DS2415+ sitting next to a GPU backed Dell R720 running Proxmox. Since I don't trust Water Panther as much as IronWolf, I am using 2 drive fault tolerance and keeping a cold spare. With the price of the refurbs, I can't beat it. Anything critical is backed up to 2 cloud environments, anyway.

[ed]

I can see that these drives are coming from Taiwan. People say that these are Exos or other Seagate white label drives relabeled.
This might be one of the factories Seagate manufacture their drives.
The cheap price might indicate that these drives didn't meet their standards and therefore need to be destroyed or sold under a different label.
Hard drive firmware nowadays can keep faulty drives alive for a long time. Regular bad sector checks will isolate these areas on the hard drive. So you always keep your data on good parts.
There is nothing wrong with using these drives, but new Synology software try to force people onto their own drives (toshiba drives). Eventually, they want to become like HPE servers.
Here is some info from $ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdb
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.ph...ves.31275/

You can use CrystalDiskInfo app to find out if this drive is used before and is there any errors.

This time you could help the community more than me by actually using them on a daily based (versus a single test by me). But if we get our hands on these we will make a video.
I will appreciate it if you share any CrystalDiskInfo reports.


I hope this helps.

[ed]

Reply "I ordered another 16TB Water Panther DAS drive, as one of my Ironwolf Pro 10TB's was increasing bad sectors at a fair rate. Due to a change in Water Panther labeling, we have an answer as to what their drives may consist of..."

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