Western Digital Lawsuit for Shipping Slower SMR Hard Drives Including WD Red NAS
hattislaw.com
hattislaw.com
When WD stealthily swapped to using device managed SMR technology in the series, they hoped that typical users wouldn't notice the change in behavior of the drives, as they assumed a small NAS would have enough downtime for the drive to manage the data being behind the scenes rearranged towards the slow shingled sections.
This assumption is not always true, but specifically it doesn't hold at all when an array has to be rebuild e.g. because of a drive failure in a raid array, as that requires writing data continuously and for a long time.
WD was caught not just using a technology that made their drives unsuited for the advertised purpose, but initially even denying that they had done so.
https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-d...
Know anything about EFBX? SMR I assume? I literally have one arriving today to replace a disk in my single disk redundancy JBOD
The whole disk buying process was irksome because I up until WD shut them down always depended on HGST.
/s
Their initial customer-facing reaction was even worse if I recall: One customer escalated his issue and asked WD to identify which drives used SMR, WD said something along the lines of We don't share that information with customers.
(If anyone has a pointer to that story I'd appreciate it. I can't find it at the moment).
EDIT:
https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shin... cites a comment on a synology board:
""" Also: “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." """
For that, they deserve the lawsuit.
It's not that simple. Even it the letters "SMR" were used in marketing, most customers won't know what the technical term means or what its implications are. In reality, it means some drives using it, such as WD Reds, are not suitable for their advertised purpose. I don't know what the law says about this in any particular part of the USA, but certainly in some other countries that would be a breach of consumer protection rules even if the technology had been disclosed.
It's roughly a 25% boost from the same physical platters. If you're storing large files with a primarily read workload, it's almost certainly the right choice.
I consider that the biggest issue. Drive manufacturers are trying to charge CMR prices for SMR drives.
ZFS and friends need to check that too and if there is an SMR drive, give warning and handle it appropriately. You can't resilver an SMR like a CMR; the performance is bad enough that a few controllers will think the drive is dead too.
For example, I imagine your typical executive at a big company looks at the list of salaries of their employees over 45 and thinks to themselves, hey, why don't we just fire these people and replace them with young people?
Then, they think about the aforementioned lawyers and subsequent class action lawsuits, and then decide not to. Sometimes.
After this upcoming class action, you can bet the next WD exec is going to think twice before screwing over their customers.
WD, obviously.
They won't like being made to pay, but that's rather the point of fines.
[1] https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-r...
If some Red drives (most probably the SMR ones) require many day rebuild times or even fail to rebuild in common commercial consumer NAS solutions, they are obviously not viable for RAID environments and then WD is guilty of false advertising.
This long time WD customer is no longer a customer.
E.g the ST4000DM000 (which I have a pile of in an array) was replaced with the ST4000DM004, which is sold as a direct replacement in that product line but is SMR.
So I had no idea about this, and was curious if this is why I've been having so many issues with 3x4TB Seagate drives in FreeNAS. Turns out all three are the SMR ST4000DM004 model, and I will be looking to replace these post-haste. My own fault using consumer drives!
If anyone is curious about said issues, it usually starts within 24 hours of booting the server. Eventually it will start throwing checksum errors on that array, even with as few as two disks in RAID1. Scrubs/resilvers generally have errors (10+ daily), and if your pool survives "too long," it will start kicking disks out of the array, and will not re-initialize them on a reboot.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seaga...
Just because Seagate says they want to upsell me for dubious market segmentation reasons doesn't mean I need to pay attention to them. I know what I'm doing, I know desktop drives work just fine for my use case.
Before SMR. Now with SMR, they've found the perfect way of getting rid of everyone who was buying desktop drives for NAS use they were perfectly suitable for, and force them into the NAS upsell. 4 years later and it still costs more to buy a NAS drive today than it cost to buy an equally fit por purpose non SMR desktop drive back then.
It typically took a really, really, really bad debacle to get that level of attention. Back when I was selling hardware, I can think of a few incidents where certain drives were just known for data loss.
Early WD IDE 20GB drives - absurdly high 90d failure rate. Shop stopped carrying WD for over a year after these
Quantum Bigfoots - At best slow, and not -terrible- for reliability but I remember them having a really nasty failure mode.
IBM Deathstars - Everyone knows about these.
Fujitsu drives in the 8-30gb era - I think these actually wound up having a lawsuit over them
Heck, back then, on top of having to worry about all of that, Creative lab sound cards could cause data corruption in some motherboards!
And yet, only IBM suffered severe damage. People kept buying bigfoots. People kept buying Early model WD drives that bit them. People kept buying creative labs cards that had bad bus mastering....
$$$
I am curious as to when these good ol days are for you.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184253-ssd-shadiness-kin...
> WD Red drives are specifically designed to handle the rigors of 24×7 FreeNAS workloads, offering excellent data protection and the highest level of performance possible.
They probably should adapt their wording.
> That 9 day and almost 14-hour rebuild means that using the WD Red 4TB SMR drive inadvertently in an array would lead to your data being vulnerable for around 9 days longer than the WD Red 4TB CMR drive or Seagate IronWolf.
The other 4TB drives they compared against completed in around 15 hours, meaning the SMR drive could potentially take 14x longer to rebuild a RAID.
Rather than ideal, a rebuild is actually the worst case scenario as the RAID may detect the drive as unresponsive as it scrambles to catch up and thus gets dropped, exacerbating the problem for the other drives in the array. This is HL2 Resonance Cascade bad.
- not all SMR drives seem to cause problems
- rebuilding on a non-fresh/cleard hard drive can have negative performance implications due to how SMR works
So my guess is that it's a problem with the firmware which can potentially be fixed. After which they could be used in a NAS, just aren't necessary as far as you might think. So I guess it's probably not looking too good for the lawsuites chances to cause much yield/discount.
Earlier story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22875094
Unless you can show that your hard drive is causing problems on something they claim compatibility with, it doesn't seem like they'd be liable. One of those times where they're clearly in the wrong, but not legally at fault.
Oh boy refrain me from celebration.
Anyway, thanks, I will contact them and try to find out what the options are.
I'm using four of the seagate ironwolf drives now and they have been fine so far. Equivalent price point and capacity, slightly quieter than the WD. Just make sure to check whether you're getting SMR or not - the ironwolf NAS drive line is not SMR according to Seagate's docs that I read but definitely verify for yoruself.
https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-d...
But here is the think: From the iXsystems blog post you can learn that not all SMT drivers so lead to errors on rebuild. Just some of the FW versions do. Other drivers might still lead to big slow downs but it's not clear if all SMT drivers slow down to a unacceptable degree. Weather it not a newly added drive is fresh/was cleaned seems to also affect this. Lastly while the drives are marketed as NAS usable they have a list of supported NAS systems. And don't give any guarantee for performance on other systems.
Given all this my guess is that after fixing faulty firmware version they will at most provide some form of we update the firmware for you service if you can show that you are using a supported NAS system. ...
And then if any consumer protection agency or similar acts in the EU that program might also be available there.
Through that just my sold guess. Thinks can be very different, e.g. not just a firmware bug.
There are quite a few stories of people being unable to use these HDDs for archival, for this reason.
Do not buy SMR if you have any kind of write-heavy workload, or if you rely on consistent performance (e.g. any kind of streaming / latency sensitive usage).
Does anybody know if that's going to be a problem? Or am I fine as long as the next drive I add is CMR?
Otherwise, you will probably be interested in replacing them sooner rather than later.
Under that assumption, my strategy is to isolate these drives in their own 2-drive RAID volume until they fail.
There was a lot of press coverage of this a few weeks ago when the story first broke, including here on HN. It looks like the lawsuit reported here is the first formal legal action in response.