Western Digital Addresses Controversy Surrounding Its Lower-Capacity Red NAS Drives in New Statement

[Tsing]

Image: Western Digital



Western Digital’s Red NAS drives have been put under a bad light recently for employing shingled magnetic recording (SMR), an arguably inferior technology that has allegedly resulted in worse performance and RAID headaches (e.g., rebuild failures) for storage enthusiasts. The company has released a new statement in an attempt to fan those flames, but unfortunately, there aren’t any apologies here, nor technical insights that demystify just how good (or bad) its 2 TB – 6 TB Red HDDs really are.



WD’s primary rebuttal is that, yes, these drives employ SMR technology – and it works swimmingly. “SMR is tested and proven technology that enables us to keep up...

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[Brian_B]

Hmm I was going to check Backblaze reports to see if they had any data on these drives, but the most recent I saw (3Q19) didn’t have any WD drives at all in it