Anyway, this is all I wanted from them. "Here are what technologies each drive uses, and we'll be more transparent in the future."
Now I can be confident in what I'm getting when I buy a Western Digital drive. Good for them!
Are you confident that you'll get a drive that can work in a NAS when on the very same blog page they claim "WD Red HDDs are ideal for home and small businesses using NAS systems" and, indeed, on the data sheet[1], they claim that WD Red drives are "the hard drive of choice for 1 to 8 bay systems"?
At the very least they need to fix the data sheet; that's where I go to assess a drive's capabilities, not a vague blog post.
[1] https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...
Just because they're no longer going to lie about this specific thing because they got enough bad press about it to force them to be honest doesn't mean they deserve any respect.
Weber, Ralph O (April 23, 2020). "SBC-5, ZBC-2: Obsolete the ZONED field". <https://www.t10.org/cgi-bin/ac.pl?t=d&f=20-054r0.pdf > (registration needed)
From my perspective as a consumer, WD has turned a disaster into an advantage. I now know that WD drives will disclose which technology they use—just like I know that Apple will bend over backwards to not secretly throttle battery performance. I can't say as much for other manufacturers.
I disagree. They explicitly denied it for months until the tech press started reporting on it. They showed nothing but contempt for their customers.
Edit: I’m never going to forget this: “Well the higher team contacted me back and informed me that the information I requested about whether or not the WD60EFAX was a SMR or PMR would not be provided to me. They said that information is not disclosed to consumers. LOL. WOW.“
From: https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shin...
the NAS, aka IronWolf, drives are all CMR, have always been CMR, and according to seagate will always be CMR
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seaga...
As I mentioned in another comment, equally pissed WD did this on (albiet smallest size) a Black label drive. WTF would they do this on their "high performance" segment is beyond me, and completely unreasonable.
Of course both companies are on my never buy list now, but some people have lower standards.
"Reliable
Designed to operate in the always-on environment of a NAS or RAID configuration"
So right now, today, they are steering people to buy these drives for an application that they are 100% not fit for. To me, that's still a disaster.
I tend to think the revealing of dishonesty has negative externalities as a general rule. Even though of course we would rather know than not.
From my point of view, by doing the wrong thing initially, and then (especially) by persisting in it for so long, they've just turned a disaster into a bigger disaster.
I haven't walked away from this feeling like WD is fundamentally honest and open and can be trusted to disclose critical information without prompting; I walked away feeling like WD is fundamentally dishonest, and will lie even after being caught. "They stopped lying eventually!" is not a strong defense.
> I now know that WD drives will disclose which technology they use
Do you? I certainly don't. All I know is they have made, under extreme pressure, a once-off disclosure of unknown accuracy around their current drive models.
Sorry, SMR HDDs are junk. The sooner the industry realizes that they're not suitable for any purpose, the better. Having a device where 4KB writes sometimes take seconds to complete is just plain unacceptable in 2020.
What if you have data you want to write once and then store for an extended period?
What if you're just on an ultra low budget?
For those wondering why SMR drives are so bad, consider the following: SMR drives basically make the same trade-off that flash makes, but with a magnetic media that has a significant seek time and bandwidth penalty compared to flash. Any time a non-sequential write is made to an SMR drive, the whole "block" (which can be many megabytes in size) needs to be read from the disk into memory, written out somewhere else on the disk after which you can finally perform the equivalent of a flash sector erase and start writing data out sequentially again. The catch is that your hard drive can only perform sequential i/o at maybe 200MB/s vs the 3GB/s flash can. Flash sectors are also measured in kilobytes (128KB is a common size), while SMR "sectors" can end up being 16-128MB in size. Do the math. The latency is a disaster as we're talking hundreds to thousands of milliseconds of latency to do an erase. Flash can erase a sector in a millisecond, and you can have multiple erases occurring in parallel across multiple planes and dies. An SMR drive can have exactly 1 erase operation in flight at a time.
If SMR drives were of any value, you'd see them at the high end of the capacity spectrum. It's funny how those products don't seem to exist.
Now, that's a data center, but don't consumers sometimes have similar cold-storage use cases? As long as they know what they're buying?
[1] https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/smr-what-we-learned-in-o...
Anandtech has a post based off of WD's press release from December 23rd 2019 here https://www.anandtech.com/show/15457/western-digital-roadmap... . The energy assisted MAMR drive is 18TB in capacity, while the SMR drive is 20TB in capacity. Where's the 25% capacity benefit? Shouldn't the SMR drive offer a capacity of 22.5TB?
Have a look at this https://www.anandtech.com/show/15457/western-digital-roadmap... article at Anandtech posted January 31st 2020. Note the side by side comparisons of projected growth of SMR drive capacity shipments. SMR growth projections are always right around the corner in the next 1-2 years. Why is this? Quite simply the market doesn't want SMR. Non-SMR technology continues to improve, eliminating SMR's capacity advantage after a period of time without SMR's orders of magnitude performance penalties.
If SMR was more than just a one time 25% capacity advantage it might be worth buying into. But it doesn't. It's a technology in search of a market that just doesn't exist because of all the downsides. HAMR and MAMR are the promising technologies to increase HDD capacity, not SMR.
They should just state it clearly in the drive's specs / model ID.
> We will update our marketing materials, as well as provide more information about SMR technology, including benchmarks and ideal use cases.
I interpreted that to mean "Future SMR drives will disclose their use of the technology". We'll of course have to see whether follow through, but for now they're doing the right things.