new Western Digital Ultrastar 12 tb drive seems sketch

Just spent the last two days moving all my files over to this new drive and reconnecting countless folders in LR due to switching from Extended Journaled to APFS...which I switched to because I wanted my laptop backup which I put on here on a small partition to be bootable. A big headache.

It is much louder than my previous 8 TB drive which was an HGST 8 tb. And it makes an alarming sounding, (to me) clattering on every startup.

It also takes over 40 seconds for the drive to mount on my desktop.

After about a minute the noise does drop off...

Has anyone else had experience with this drive? Any suggestions on a different, quieter, 12 or 14 TB drive? Or maybe I just got a lemon or UPS hucked it over the fence too vigorously?

* The more digging I do seems to suggest that even though I'm running Catalina and have an SSD on my main machine that formatting this spinning HDD to APFS may be causing it to make more clattering noise and run slower. Should've just stuck to Tri-X and printfile pages I guess.

No experience with this, but bought their GRaid 28Tb dual drive and am delighted. With T bolt-3, it fast, very quiet and so far without problems.

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Originally Posted by GG12

No experience with this, but bought their GRaid 28Tb dual drive and am delighted. With T bolt-3, it fast, very quiet and so far without problems.

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Just remember, RAID is not backup-- even more so if you've got 28TB of capacity. That means it's most likely running in RAID-0 (striped)... which not only means no redundancy, but the data will be inaccessible if either drive fails.

Yeah, AFPS not really meant for spinning rust drives:
https://bombich.com/blog/2019/09/12/...al-hard-drives

If possible, I would reformat with HFS+.

I have a mirrored pair of 12tb Seagate Ironwolf running on my FreeNAS box for “don’t access that often” stuff, and they’re pretty quiet. But of course those drives are not formatted with APFS.

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Originally Posted by grat

Just remember, RAID is not backup-- even more so if you've got 28TB of capacity. That means it's most likely running in RAID-0 (striped)... which not only means no redundancy, but the data will be inaccessible if either drive fails.

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I always understood the Raid 1 (disk mirroring) provides backup of the drive and contents. With the caveat that there still should be a backup in another physical location.

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Originally Posted by HMG

I always understood the Raid 1 (disk mirroring) provides backup of the drive and contents. With the caveat that there still should be a backup in another physical location.

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In general, for a two disk setup, there is RAID-1, which is mirroring, where everything written to disk 1 is written to disk 2. This means two 14TB drives only store 14TB of data. If either disk fails, you still have all your data, but since it has to write to both drives, there may be a penalty in write speed.

Then there is RAID 0, where data is written across the two drives. There might be a *slight* write penalty, but reads will be faster. However, if either disk fails, you lose all your data. You get 28TB of storage, as you can use full capacity of both disks.

Finally, there's "JBOD" (literally, 'just a bunch of disks'). You have two 14TB disks that operate independently. No redundancy, but if one disk fails, you still have data on the other.

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Originally Posted by nguyenhm16

Yeah, AFPS not really meant for spinning rust drives:
https://bombich.com/blog/2019/09/12/...al-hard-drives

If possible, I would reformat with HFS+.

I have a mirrored pair of 12tb Seagate Ironwolf running on my FreeNAS box for “don’t access that often” stuff, and they’re pretty quiet. But of course those drives are not formatted with APFS.

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Yea Thanks after posting I read that too, and did reformat the old way. It sounds like a completely different drive. Not only way quieter and mounts faster, but the noise is very different, less clattery and more clicky.

For anyone else reading this, I would def agree, don't format spinning drive with AFPS.

It won't be bootable if you're backing up your boot drive but all the data would be there and should be no problem to get back using migration assistant.

And don't use the optional drive encryption on mechanical drives... Much slower and less recovery options should it need professional help.