Who buys this garbage? I swore off WD and refunded several drives after their SMR scam. I wouldn't touch any of their online services.
Never trusted WD cloud though. History taught me no disk or nas is safe when it's reachable via the big bad internet.
1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...
You throw terabytes at CMR drive - it's just writes them to LBAs.
You do the same at SMR drive - as soon as it's depletes FastCache/MediaCache or whatever it's called (buffer zones in CMR style to handle bursts of incoming data) it crawls to 1990's speeds OR even drops out of system.
But honestly, there is almost no options left at the moment. There is no 2.5" CMR drives anymore and with 3.5" it's only a bigger disks with a price premium.
A lot of folks don't realize that SMR drives have a lot more in common with SSD firmware with its emulated virtual block layer and wear leveling than a traditional HDD. Having the same kind of virtual block layer is where the problems come from.
With SSDs, virtual blocks stored in pages that are about to be erased have to be relocated elsewhere. SMR drives have to do the same sort of thing but with sequential recording for the overlapping tracks. All the same nightmares exist including garbage collection/reclaimation, de-fragmentation, managing TRIM (or parsing NTFS data structures), etc etc. With SMR, handling the worst case scenarios are made more difficult by seek latency - something that isn't as much of an issue for SSD storage.
All of this tends to invalidate cherished assumptions that unix/linux file systems make about HDD storage. And that's ignoring the issues about the devices reaching timeout thresholds - again, the kinds of things that Windows is OK with but really hurts linux/unix systems.
WD4003FFBX CMR|SMR
https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/update-wd-red-smr-...
that is of course no reason to touch their online services
You are right though, hard drives are kinda all much the same.
I say this as someone who up until then always bought WD HDDs.
Needless to say I only buy WD if I ever still need an HDD. Wouldn't ever use their cloud though.
As pure hard drives, they are rock solid. Any other WD services (especially cloud): stay away from them as if they are radioactive.
If you care about a single drive dying, then yeah, buy WD I guess, but at the same time, I can't imagine a sane case to rely on any single drive not failing. I'd always have redundancy if I am talking spinning disk (and of course backups regardless), because the reality is no matter who makes it, eventually it'll die, and none of them can guarantee anything.
The story is interesting enough to mention: first it showed up as non-formatted. Turned out the disk was encrypted and the key was stored in the enclosure which somehow lost it.
After a while I found out the encryption key was stored on the disk on a predictable location and could be extracted and used to decrypt the disk, but at that point the disk had stopped answering completely.
I still keep it around because someday I will probably try to get a recovery company to look at it, but I still wonder why they put that "encryption" feature there in the first place.