WD Elements Desktop storage on RPI

I've been using WD Elements 1GB and 2GB 3.5" USB-connected drives, each formatted as a single ext4 partition, as backups for several years now, under RedHat Fedora 35.

No problems at all: they just work.

Thanks for that. Reassuring.

Not on a Pi specifically, but I've used three of those* on x86 Linux and they have been fine. They worked with ZFS, although with four drives in raidz2 it's a bit hard on the USB subsystem - I eventually removed them from the enclosures and fitted them as SATA drives, where there's more bandwidth. (if fitting as SATA you need to ensure there's no 3.3v power supplied on the SATA power port - easiest is a 5.25" Molex to SATA power adapter)

Noise is OK - not silent, not loud, they make noise when seeking but it's just a mild rumbling really. In raidz2 every noise is of all 4 drives operating at the same time, which makes it louder than it is for one drive.

You don't need 'Linux support', you'll just have to reformat them and trash the Windows software that comes preloaded on the drive, but that's useless anyway.

Not sure why enclosures would be limited to 8 or 10TB, since there's no limit at that point. Possibly they just never tested them with bigger drives.

If using with a Pi, they have an external 12v PSU so you don't need the Pi to power them, so should be good to go. If you have multiple drives the

Theo

• I couldn't vouch for the exact part numbers and they may change mechanism between revisions - that one appears to be the Australian edition. It is important to avoid SMR drives with ZFS, so I'd just confirm that WD haven't sneaked in an SMR mechanism in the current version.

I found the enclosure of one of mine, it's a 14TB WDBWLG0140HBK-XB. I also have a WDBWLG012HBK-0B which is a 12TB version.

Theo

Slightly off-topic, but a cautionary tale...

If you use a USB-powered drive you should use a powered hub to power the drive, rather than powering it from the Pi, because the latter with a genuine Pi PSU may overload the PSU.

Fair enough, but... with a Pi 4 (as opposed to Pi 3 B+) you may find with some hubs that the Pi will fail to boot: it hangs before displaying anything diagnostic on screen until you unplug the USB hub from the Pi or the disc from the hub, at which point booting continues as normal. This is even using a specially-prepared USB cable that I had spare, which has its 5V line cut (there were rumours that the Pi 4 doesn't like an external device to feed power up the 5V line to the Pi. The same disc and hub worked fine with a Pi

I had to change to a 5 1/4" SATA drive in a powered USB-SATA caddy: that works fine. I imagine I could alternatively have used a 3 1/2" drive if I'd had one of those spare.