On WD Red NAS Drives
blog.westerndigital.com
blog.westerndigital.com
Absolute baloney. SMR is useful if it allows you to attain capacities otherwise unattainable, which isn't the case here. Note that the higher capacity Red drives don't use SMR. Older Red drives of these capacities, and non-Red drives of these capacities, don't use SMR.
Also, notice how now they're openly admitting that these are SMR drives. Nowhere in this post do they admit that they previously deliberately concealed this fact.
EDIT: Also note that they talk about these being "drive-managed SMR" drives, and they are, but they reportedly don't advertise themselves to the OS as being drive-managed SMR, as they're supposed to do as per the ATA specifications (unlike other WD DMSMR drives which do). They literally designed the drives themselves to lie about this.
>Additionally, some of you have recently shared that in certain, more data intensive, continuous read/write use cases, the WD Red HDD-powered NAS systems are not performing as you would expect.
They literally built a NAS drive which can't handle RAID, and are acting like this isn't their failing.
I wonder if reporting to the OS that it is a SMR drive would kick in host-managing SMR code paths that conflict with how the drive managed SMR works. While I'm not terribly inclined to give WD the benefit of the doubt, this seems certainly possible. It seems like it should be possible to test by modifying whatever part of the Linux kernel or userspace tools control this and having it use the model number instead of what the drive reports as its SMR status. Granted on a closed device like a Synology NAS, this isnt possible for a user to do though Synology themselves could, and probably should test this.
But, why would failure to expose TRIM cause errors in in rebuilding a RAID, in which case old drives should be more or less read-only, and replacement drives write only? My understanding is that TRIM should affect re-writing sectors only.
I don't see why RAID rebuilds should take notably longer on SMR drives, if only they were properly managed - by both the RAID driver and drive FW. Though it's hard to properly utilize a DMSMR black box.
This kind of behavior really annoys me and I hope the market brutally punishes them for it, but I'm not holding my breath.
"The data intensity of typical small business/home NAS workloads is intermittent, leaving sufficient idle time for DMSMR drives to perform background data management tasks as needed and continue an optimal performance experience for users."
A NAS drive, which features RAID specific firmware no less, is _very_ likely to be put in a RAID, and rebuilding the RAID after replacing a disk is exactly the opposite of an intermittent workload.
What they should have done is this:
- Change the name slightly, "WD Red Lite" or something.
- Make sure the product information page (and firmware if applicable) says this is a DM-SMR drive.
- Say it is intended for single-disk or RAID-1 (mirror) setups, and is not recommended in RAID-5, RAID-6 or similar setups, with links to their Red Pro disks for that.
That would allowed them to capitalize on the "WD Red" name as something consumers have heard about, while also not right out lying about a very important aspect of the product.
Either way yeah this was an attempt at a cash grab. Which was quite stupid, because there's no way they'd be able to hide the fact that it's SMR for long, the performance characteristics is just too different.
But it's also totally unnecessary, because SMR is perfectly fine for use-cases with sparse random write workloads. Something most casual home users or small businesses with a 1 or 2 disk Synology or similar has.
WD has proven they are anything but ethical with this move, I moved from Seagate to WD awhile back for many of my personal drives, looks like it is time to move back to Seagate or Toshiba from now on..
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seaga...
I expected, per their advertisements, a cheap barebones LAN visible NAS with SMB shares.
What i got was basically a self hosted google drive that: - doesn't work without internet even on LAN - can be accessed as SMB share only with WD spyware installed! - WD spyware crashed my graphics drivers - WD spyware works only when there is internet connection available - can be only managed via internet - costs more than space on any cloud storage provider for self hosted solution - you have utter lack of privacy as they scan, and analyze each file on your drive as per their ToS, same thing with their application - hence i call it spyware.
Even regular idle scrubbing is going to potentially keep drives 100% busy for extended periods of time. Combined with online backup/etc. Its crazy! Do they think that only enterprises run their NAS'es with backup, or workloads that provide a low level of near constant background activity?
This is a money grab, plain and simple. Had they substituted SMR drives at a lower price they might have a leg to stand on. But as others have mentioned, they didn't - they lied until they got caught and are now pretending like they were up-front. Talk about making a bad situation worse. The headline should've been "We're sorry, here's what we're doing to fix it" - instead it's "there's nothing wrong, it's YOUR fault you caught me cheating".
Oh, well. i'll return them and keep returning them until they work right.
I am a total layman w.r.t Hard Drives, but it seems pretty simple (please correct me if I'm wrong):
- They used a technology that impacts performance, that allows them to make higher capacity drives for cheaper.
- The technology used prohibits them from being used in certain application context (citation needed/general consensus?)
- They marketed the product as being suitable for those certain application contexts, when they aren't.
- They come out with a blog, telling consumers to buy their more expensive drives instead?
Freudian slip?
I feel like this is an understatement. In certain scenarios for which they were designed, because of this performance issue, they fail to work at all. Maybe that is covered by the following points but I feel like "stops responding" and "impacts performance" are very different things.
The only reason to do this is to trick customers into buying the wrong product by accident! There is literally no good faith reading of this change. If they wanted to provide better value for the people who don't mind the SMR performance characteristics, that's great, but that would involve clearly marketing the line as such, not simply redefining what "WD Red" means.
The one thing faster spinning drives do buy, is lower seek time because rotational latency tends to be the largest contributor to average seek.
That is part of the reason you don't see a lot of drives spinning faster than 7200RPM these days. SSD's ate the market which wanted speed over capacity,
I've been patiently waiting for 3600/4200 RPM 5.25" drives to make a comeback.. <chuckle>
This was the case for sixtysome years.
Then some douchebag decided that Pyrex wasn't a material, it was a "brand", and started slapping the name on kitchenware made of soda-lime glass, which will straight-up explode if you treat it like borosilicate.
But then another brand by Corning is the same, they had a range of unbreakable product called Corelle, the new stuff since it got sold off just isn't the same.
Uh what ? What do you mean, I don’t see any relationship between Pyrex and the war on drugs at all and I’m really curious !
[0] http://themainframe.ca/content/images/2015/09/Pyrex-infograp...
A few years ago i7 also meant basically the high end desktop market (socket 2011) which meant more ram and IO. But then they slapped it on the dual channel desktop socket market.
So, yah the brand becomes meaningless when its just marketing for "this one will cost you more".
Wishing them a VW level wave of karma.
The key thing I want from a drive is reliability. I don't want to lose my data. That far beats size, noise, speed, cost, or just about anything else in what I will shop on. A drive that loses data will cost my thousands of dollars.
My perception of reliability comes down to trust and transparency.If I can't trust a drive maker, I won't buy from them.
WD just went into my don't-trust don't-buy pile.
I actually don't have any non-critical applications. If my mom's laptop hard drive fails, that's still thousands of dollars of my time helping her. It's no less important than enterprise (indeed, I'd argue more, since she doesn't have RAID).
Unfortunately... The competitor(s) you want, no longer exist! Here are some facts.
* Seagate - WD's main competitor - historically didn't have a reputation of high reliability in the industry [0][1]. Its ST3000DM001 [2] drive was terrible enough to have its own Wikipedia article, which is extremely unusual for a hard drive. In terms of reputation of reliability, WD was better, and HGST (Hitachi) had the best.
* Then WD brought HGST. It was kept as an independent operation for a while, since it was required by the regulators. But now it has been fully merged into WD. As parts of the deal, Toshiba received some hard drive assets from WD, thus, Seagate, WD, and Toshiba are the only three hard drive manufacturers, forming a worldwide oligopoly. Wikipedia has a great diagram showing the process of corporate consolidation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Driv...
* Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too [3].
So what can we do? Not much. Buy Toshiba exclusively to make WD and Seagate less powerful? Maybe. But none of them is honest in the SMR affair. Nevertheless, relatively speaking, I do find that WD's denial has made the other two more honest comparatively.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8355860
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11110902
In the early days, I waited to adopt SSDs because of horror stories about wear leveling algorithm bugs causing early failures (because SSD makers wanted to eek out a little bit of extra speed). Speed is nice-to-have, but fast, unreliable storage has negative value to me.
On the flip side, if I now can't trust HDDs, I won't buy them. 8TB is nice-to-have, but reliability is critical. 8TB of unreliable storage has negative value to me.
I mean, I was pretty productive in the days of 133MHz computers, 32MB of RAM, and 1.6GB disk space. I prefer gigahertz of multicore performance, 32GB of RAM, and terabytes of disk space, but it's not worth sacrificing reliability for. A computer failure can cost me a week of time.
If it all worked, I'd have a 1TB SSD RAID and an 8TB HDD RAID, each with two drives so if one fails, the other goes on.
That's not just me. A random computer buyer might now know better, but if you buy a computer and something breaks, whoever makes it devalues their brand. If the HDD makers collude to give untrustworthy storage, they won't have a market left.
I'll mention cloud storage is a competitor too.
There are some overlaps, but it's a different market. If someone still buys HDDs, certainly it means SSDs are not suitable for the job, at least in term of cost.
> I'll mention cloud storage is a competitor too.
Maybe for cold storage, syncing data and object storage. But still, there is no replacement for a box of spinning hard drives in many applications.
I think what just happened is that CMR drives just got more expensive, which may erase some of that cost advantage. Not all of it, not yet.
But principle is worth something, too. I expect a few folks who are sortof on the border will be so soured on spinning rust by this whole ordeal, as to swear it off completely.
As far as I am concerned, SMR are unfit for any purpose other than hyperscale archival storage. If you work for AWS Glacier, good for you, but those drives should never ever be sold to consumers.
A marginally-related comment: Curiously, HDDs are not totally immune to this problem in the long run. Many types of EEPROMs (basically used by everything that has a CPU/MCU inside) only have an officially data retention duration of 10 years, beyond the date, there's no guarantee by the manufacturers that the firmware won't be lost. Yet surprisingly, most consumer electronics work fine after one or two decades, indeed it's because the EEPROM manufacturers are being conservative, not to mention that most electronics are stored room temperature.
There is wild variations of rated lifetime in different microcontrollers, a most common rating is 10 years, but some are 40 years or even 100 years at 25 °C. It indicates that it's related to the semiconductor process, and it also implies EEPROMs have a lot of potential but it's expensive and/or there are too many uncertainties to make any guarantee. How long will today's technology last in the wild is still largely untested in practice.
Long story short, I see EEPROMs as a time bomb of the digital (dark) age. Imagine when a future archeologist wants to download data from a HDD made in 2010, only to find that all firmware and parameters in the EEPROMs are gone, permanently bricking the electronics, even when the platters, motors and the head are good.
Conclusion: In terms of data archiving, SSDs are bad, HDDs are much better and suitable for most people, but tape drives are still the real archival medium.
The future remake of Indiana Jones seems way less fun.
What do you think of optical media like BD-R?
I've heard that the inorganic substrate they use these days is decent for archival.
* Most data is reasonably small, and super-critical. I might have legal documents, personal emails, source code, etc. My business might have basic employee information, or sales transactions. Most of that, efficiently-stored, would fit in a box of 1.44MB floppies.
* I have medium-sized data like photos (product, family, etc).
* I have big data, like videos. A workplace might have surveillance videos, while I might have copies of movies I like, and ISOs of software I bought.
The above is a bit of a obfuscated to not reveal personal information (I took analogies to the types of data I and my business have).
In many cases, it doesn't make sense to have multiple storage locations and to manage all that yourself (management gets too expensive). It's cheaper to keep your big stuff on expensive media than to take time or to hire a software engineer.
At some point, I also start to either discard things explicitly (erase a file), or implicitly (photos/videos with lossy compression). A question is when that happens.
The answer, I think, just moved from "at 8TB, on a WD drive" to "at 1TB, on an SSD."
I used to run 1 SSD + 4 drives in two RAID 1 arrays for this, but with how reliable SSD's have become, and with faster internet allowing for cheap offsite backup, those days are gone.
>I'll mention cloud storage is a competitor too.
It is, but today for my home system it cost me about $2-3/TB/MO (maybe less that number is about 3 years old, and drives have dropped in price recently) to build and maintain reliable storage, with backups, that include electricity and amortized capital costs along with replacement hardware every 5-7 years
The absolute cheapest cloud storage out there right now if $5/TB/MO so it getting close, and if drive manufacturer start playing shading games like this that increase the Cost per TB then that might be the tipping point.
When we asked Seagate about the Barracudas and the Desktop HDD using SMR technology, a spokesperson told us: “I confirm all four products listed use SMR technology.”
In a follow-up question, we asked why isn’t this information is not explicit in Seagate’s brochures, data sheets and product manuals – as it is for Exos and Archive disk drives?
Seagate’s spokesperson said: “We provide technical information consistent with the positioning and intended workload for each drive.”
( https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-ba... )
Whereas Toshiba's representative at least cooperated and did not just spout further delusional corporate doublespeak when questioned about the lying.
Blocks & Files asked Toshiba to confirm that the 4TB and 6TB P300 desktop drives use SMR and clarify which drives in its portfolio use SMR.
A company spokesperson told us: “The Toshiba P300 Desktop PC Hard Drive Series includes the P300 4TB and 6TB, which utilise the drive-managed SMR (the base drives are DT02 generation 3.5-inch SMR desktop HDD).
“Models based on our MQ04 2.5-inch mobile generation all utilise drive-managed SMR, and include the L200 Laptop PC Hard Drive Series, 9.5mm 2TB and 7mm 1TB branded models.
“Models based on our DT02 3.5-inch desktop generation all utilise drive managed SMR, and include the 4/6TB models of the P300 Series branded consumer drives.”
The company also told us which other desktop drives did and did not use SMR:
MD07ACA – 7,200rm 12TB, 14TB CMR (base of X300 Performance Hard Drive Series branded models
MD04 – 7,200rpm – 2, 4, 5, 6TB CMR (base for X300 Performance Hard Drive Series branded models
DT02 – 5,400rpm – 4, 6 TB SMR (base for P300 Desktop PC Hard Drive Series 4TB and 6TB branded models)
DT01 – 7, 200rpm – 500GB, 1,2,3 TB CMR (base for P300 Desktop PC Hard Drive Series 1/2/3TB branded models)( https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/16/toshiba-desktop-disk-d... )
And while the use of inferior technology should certainly have been announced in all these cases, watering down the product seems slightly less unforgivable for the class of slow Desktop brand drives, in my perception, as the expectations there shouldn't clash quite as badly with the performance issues.
"5400 RPM class" which means what exactly?
And of course the whole desktop vs nas differentiation was the early return on error logic being hard coded instead of configurable by the OS/RAID. Remove a feature charge more..
A use case which seems to cause failure is inserting a drive into a RAID array. These drives are advertised as being for use in RAID arrays.
Does NAS drive arrays exist outside of a RAID? Is there such a thing in consumer, prosumer, or professional setups?
WD's actions are still inexcusable, especially because the non-SMR and SMR models cost pretty much the same. No savings being passed on to us. Pure greed.
RAID has several levels.. Any RAID that uses Parity will have a problem with SMR, but Mirror and Striped array probally will not
A common use case is a 2 Disk Mirror NAS for SMB.
Further NAS manufactures like QNap, and even WD do make single disk NAS Appliances
However the WD Red line is branded for NAS upto 8 drives, Most likly that will be a RAID5 or 6 array making SMR not usable in that configuration
"These are the drives we currently sell which use SMR. When we use SMR in the future, we'll disclose it."
Had they done this, the whole snafu would have actually made me more likely to buy WD drives than before!
But they didn't do it. Oh well.
Does it apply in this case? IANAL but my guess is that it should apply, as it meets two of the prerequisites:
- are not fit for the specific purpose required by the consumer, of which he/she informed the seller at the moment of conclusion of the contract, and which the seller accepted;
- are not fit for the usual purpose of goods of the same type;
[1] https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/consumer-topics/buyin...
It seems very strange to argue that customers should just know beforehand what they need, while also at the same time acknowledging the hiding (or at the very least, omission) of the information customers need in order to make that decision.
To the product manager at WD who is inevitably reading this: if your hardware doesn't live up to your own marketing, I'm not going to throw more money your way. I'm switching to your competition.
I'll take my chances with ${not_wd}. At least they can survive a rebuild, so if a drive dies early I can replace it with something else.
I happen to have replaced a failed drive in my NAS box with one of these. I just checked the logs for the rebuild time and while my array has 8T, I'm only using 3.3T so it had to rebuild about 800 GB (this is Linux software raid on an older 4-bay synology diskstation). It took about 7 hours end to end, which while not amazing, is still ~30MB/second.
To be clear, this was on a Saturday night, and I don't use my NAS box for plex serving or anything (nor do I use ZFS, so I totally understand the rage of folks with random I/O rebuilds that have been screwed by this). Is everyone else assuming a rebuild of a very active NAS box?
To reiterate, I still disagree with WD on this, but I'm not holding my breath for a $5 after-laywers-fees class-action settlement check :).
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seaga...
Seagate does seem to think SMR is applicable for desktop use, however. But that's a fight for another day...
This wouldn’t be a problem if flash were cheap enough in the volumes required for archival level storage, but it isn’t. Flash storage is actually going up this year as demand continues to increase.
I suspect there’s no ready answer for those that hoard data now or in the future.
Honestly, how big is your personal hoard anyway if a few 16TB drives won't cover it? Isn't it the case that at some point you will have amassed more media than you could possibly consume?
It's likely that 16TB won't keep up with further technological advances.
there isn't currently a ton of 4K content available, but there's lots of 1080p. if you rip/download enough bluray 1080p to watch an hour every night, that's almost 5TB per year right there. if there were enough 4K content to support your habit, it would be more than 12TB a year.
So that's 50GB/20$. Or $400/TB. So the content to fill those hard drives is about 5x the drives yourself. So it's not infeasible that people could fill them with legal movies.
Not to mention TV shows, video games, and content that is much denser in GB/$.
Hard disk raid rebuild is basically an offline process for wide stripes and raid 6. Assume 2x parity overhead (eg 2 raid one disks, or a 2+2 setup) for hard disks, and close to zero for NAND (5+2) and SSDs are 3-4x more expensive than spinning disk.
Also, you can be more aggressive with compression and dedup with NAND, and it takes up less power, cooling and case space.
So, NAND is somewhere between 4x-1x the price of disk for archival. At scale, to get to 4x you’re probably talking about nearline retrieval.
The best answer is multiple copies, preferably on different media: hedge your bets and use both, and verify it periodically so you’d know before your “working” drive throws a ton of errors when you actually try to read the data.
If tape was cheaper I'd consider that.
Magnetic media does degrade, moving parts freeze or fail in other ways, and the circuitry can also fail. It’s often possible recover that at some cost but it’s much more expensive than n > 1 copies.
EDIT: typo
So, 12 days of downtime for the NAS. Doesn't sound like a very NAS-specific product to me. That's 3.3% downtime in 12 months from a single HDD failure. 12 days of sweating on another HDD not failing during the rebuild process.
Not fit for purpose.
I am wary of so many differentiated products out there. Just in case I want to save 5 cents on an SSD so I can get a 50x increase of 95% latency. Reliability is most important and the way you get there is volume. I'd rather see a good drive that is made in large numbers rather than 100 SOUs that can never really be tested.
There was no option to escalate, continue troubleshooting, nothing. I went back to the Netgear ones I was trying to "upgrade" from.
A hard drive or SSD is a complex device. Are you going to expect the customer service people help you dump the firmware out that JTAG port? People like that can be trained and equipped with simple diagnostics and remedy options, they can't be expected to get into the fine details of product selection.
But yeah, I understand why it doesn't exist.
Is that really true? The likelihood of unrecoverable sector errors goes up as the number of sectors increases.
Reliability is only solid if you have a good backup/recovery plan being practiced. Multiple copies on multiple formats in multiple locations. Original content on SSDs? Make a back up on HDD and/or recordable disc formats. Keep a copy at a friend's/parent's house. Keep a copy in the cloud (Backblaze as an example). If the data is worthy of backing up, do it right.
As for backup that is a vastly unmet need. You have the carbonite scam that is on the rush Limbaugh show (unlimited yeah right) the corporate backup clients that turn home working to not working, and tape drives that cost more than 10 times the size of a drive they can back up, not counting the cost of the tapes, high probability that you pick a bad technology generation of lto, high probability that restore fails, etc.
The computer press has been telling people to back up for years but effective solutions have never been there for the consumer.
(I will spare you my rant on how bad RAID software is. But this is yet another interesting edge case that RAID software doesn't handle and reacts by just blowing away your data.)
It hurts random-write performance after a threshold, when an on-disk staging area becomes exhausted. For short bursts, the drive behaves well -- it probably would legitimately work in a RAID array if the array were initialized from a clean slate and not rebuilt.
> But this is yet another interesting edge case that RAID software doesn't handle and reacts by just blowing away your data.
It's not obvious how a RAID controller should "handle" this. The drives have no outward indication that they suffer from random write saturation. From the controller's perspective, the degraded performance looks very much like a drive failure.
DM-SMR at the very least. If the RAID controller (hardware or software) is SMR-capable, then host-managed or host-aware can work.
For example, ZFS with the recent support for separate metadata devices[1] seems to be close to what you'd need for it to become SMR-capable.
Sure, but given the choice between "During a rebuild, it looks like another drive isn't doing so well, so I should give up and trash the array"
and
"During a rebuild, it looks like another drive isn't doing so well, so I should notify the administrator and meanwhile try to maintain as much redundancy as I can"
which is the sensible choice?
I am interested in your rant.
I have a lot of WD(HGST) (more than 2 PB) in service as of now. I will never buy anything WD until they come clean on shit like this. They should talk to VW about Karma and how it bites your behind.
From https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...
The newer WD##EFAX ones are SMR but if your drive is a few years old then it's probably a WD40EFRX which is NOT a SMR drive.
[1] https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/list-of-known-...
The 8TB and larger drives use the exact same WD##EFAX model number, but aren't SMR.
Earlier models (WDx0EFRX) were not SMR.
Newer ones (WDx0EFAX) are, up to 6TB.
> The easiest way to detect whether it is a SMR drive is the cache size. Old drives (WDx0EFRX) had 64MB cache whereas new replaced drives (WDx0EFAX) feature 256MB.
This information will become less useful as newer drive models come out and cache sizes for non-SMR drives are bumped up.
Source: https://nascompares.com/answer/how-to-tell-a-difference-betw...
You could also enter your harddrive model number in the search bar and have a look at the recording process there.
Note: I have no idea how accurate the information is for every hdd out there, but it does seem accurate with the three hdds I have (that are relatively recent). The models I looked at are: Seagate ST2000DM008 (SMR) WesternDigital WD10EACS (CMR) Toshiba HDWD130UZSVA (CMR)
AFAICT, we're safe.
So, they're saying the new low end WD Red drives are unfit for purpose. And boy do they have a solution just ready and waiting to go.
Which presumably, uses the older CMR (eg normal) tech to do the same thing. They probably just rebadged the older drive models that work. ;)
You are misleading the consumer and should have called it WD Pink, because the SMR drives are a totally different product.
"If you have purchased a WD Red drive, please call our customer care if you are experiencing performance or any other technical issues. We will have options for you. We are here to help."
Other than refunding or providing a replacement non-SMR drive without extra cost to the consumer are the only options.
Also, stop using raid 5 people. The risk of failure cascades given the build times on such large drives means it should be almost totally deprecated imho.
Not as cost efficient, but rebuild times should be much lower. Is also more flexible in some cases, like when using ZFS for example.
I've learnt all this the hard way.
Most people bought multiple drives at a time, spending hundreds of dollars. This seems like a prime candidate for technology-assisted small claims court, for the full purchase price of the counterfeit drives.
Even if all the money goes to lawyers, it's still a better deal for consumers than getting nothing.
https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/toshiba-internal-ha...
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#m=111...
They also have surveillance video storage drives and enterprise drives that might do well in the same applications.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sneaky-marketing-toshiba-s...
It used to be so simple
Green - slow cheap, Blue - faster more pricey than green, Black - fastest more pricey than blue, Red - fast as Blue but pricey but good for NAS
Western Digital, circa 2025
https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutoria...
Defrauded is the word you were searching.
The problem will be getting replacements for these, as it's not safe to just buy HDDs anymore.
Be aware that this drive uses SMR technology (Shingled Magnetic Recording) to achieve such high density in a small package. If you don't know what that is, think of how shingles on a roof are laid out partially overlapping each other - that is how the data is laid out on the drive platters. While this allows significantly higher capacities, it creates some complexity to writing. If the drive needs to write data in the middle of existing data, it can't just "place" it there like a HDD using PMR technology because other data also overlaps it. What it has to do is put the data in a temporary location, then re-write all the shingled data afterwards to the end of the track break.
I mean, where do you go for reliable storage at this point?
1. Its performance is noticeably worse than CMR.
2. The density increase SMR provides compared to CMR is not that much. It's 25% at most.
3. SMR is not a separate evolutionary path that can be developed further to have increasingly more density compared to CMR. It is more like a variation of the same technology which provides slightly more density in exchange for serious disadvantages. SMR and CMR both directly depend on, and benefit from developments in platter densities. When a new, denser platter generation is introduced, CMR and SMR benefit from it same.
4. A huge portion of the drive must be reserved as a non-SMR cache area to mitigate the performance penalty SMR brings. Notice that this is an extra area that does not exist on a CMR drive so it reduces density increase SMR brings.
5. SMR drives have much larger DRAM cache to mitigate the performance penalty (64MB on a CMR drive vs 256MB on SMR drives), increasing the cost for that part.
6. Logic and mechanism of writes are much more complicated on a SMR drive than a CMR one. Drive is separated into different zones, data must be stored on a cache zone, then new data should be written into permanent zones in an optimal manner in background during idle time, managing different zones, cache area, rewrites, background tasks etc. all these makes the drive firmware much more complicated. Compared to a SSD firmware it is actually worse of both worlds: You're getting all the complexity of a SSD firmware with a worse performance than a regular hard drive.
7. What is even more worrying than those technical details are that vendors are sinking more and more resources and pushing very hard on technologically dead-end SMR technology. WD even wrote a PR piece called a "Zoned storage initiative" for trying to paint host managed SMR technology the future of storage and developed a linux filesystem called zonefs to back it up.
8. Despite all those shortcomings, they don't even sell SMR drives cheaper than CMR drives.
TL;DR: SMR is a harmful technological "drug" HDD vendors use to buy at most few years of time in platter density but with a very serious side effects.
All the backlash seems to have worked.
It just makes me wonder how easily they believe their customer base can be placated.
Had I known I was not receiving what I thought I had purchased, I would have likely purchased a different drive.
The least WD could do is unilaterally extend the warranty of these misrepresented drives to easily deal with any fears, if they really believe in their products as such.
It will be interesting to see if the MTTB on these drives is in a smaller spectrum of time.
Given that RAID rebuild times are increasing as the size of the drives are increasing, and SMR exacerbates the longer rebuild times, these drives should not be used in the NAS or RAID systems for which that they were marketed.
By obfuscating the use of SMR in their WD Red line, WD willfully and intentionally harmed their customers.
An advance ship program to swap drives with SMR is what should happen.
This is the kind of stuff that happens when marketing and accounting take over and start running the engineering departments.
Other operating systems don't lie to you.
When the SI units were standardized in 1998, it helped drive manufacturers advertise larger numbers but it also rectified this accident of history where a standard prefix had been used with a non-standard definition in only one part of computing.
EDIT: Not capital punishment for the people involved obviously, but the companies should be severely sanctioned. Possibly even closed. The involved management should be prohibited from holding management positions in the future for 10 years or more. Oh, and all bonuses paid out since the fraud started should be reclaimed with personal fines.
I'd thought it would just slow down a lot when software tries continuous writing, and am curious how much that is. (ideally, this is something WD should publish, since they claim it's fine, but ...)