Western Digital Admits That More Than Half of Its WD Red NAS Drives Use Slower SMR Technology

[Tsing]

Image: Western Digital



For a while now, data storage enthusiasts have been wondering why some of their WD Red NAS drives have been failing with their RAID/ZFS arrays and/or exhibiting signs of slower performance. It turns out that many of these HDDs actually use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) instead of perpendicular (conventional) magnetic recording (PMR/CMR) technology – a fact that Western Digital never bothered listing in its specification sheets.



“All our WD Red drives are designed meet or exceed the performance requirements and specifications for common small business/home NAS workloads,” said Western Digital. “We work closely with major NAS providers to ensure WD Red HDDs (and SSDs) at all capacities have broad compatibility with host systems. Currently, Western Digital’s WD...

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[Peter_Brosdahl]

Bum move WD. I have one of these, 8TB, in a Kodi box and it's been great but I did consider getting 3 or 4 of the 6TB models for a RAID when SSD prices spiked a few years ago. According to the story the speed drop between the two is around 40-50 Mbps so it's not huge but that'd be a bummer if I needed or expected that performance. Either way the prices have been pretty good for them.

 

[Brian_B]

Yeah if I’m buying a spinner it’s based on $/byte and speed is an afterthought.

That being said, yeah - WD should have been more transparent, not very good mixing tech without a distinction on the label. They didn’t exactly misrepresent, they just omitted.

 

[_k_]

From the article that is linked it seems pretty clear official channels in WD stated these drives were not SMR.

 

[Zarathustra]

That is more than just a bum move. That is total bullshit.

Any word on when they started doing this?

 

[Zarathustra]

Bum move WD. I have one of these, 8TB, in a Kodi box and it's been great but I did consider getting 3 or 4 of the 6TB models for a RAID when SSD prices spiked a few years ago. According to the story the speed drop between the two is around 40-50 Mbps so it's not huge but that'd be a bummer if I needed or expected that performance. Either way the prices have been pretty good for them.

I don't really care about the speed much. I use hard drives for slower data storage, not for stuff that needs to be fast.

I'm more concerned with the lower reliability of SMR. My understanding is that technology is better suited to stuff that gets written once and then sits for a long time, rather than frequent writes...

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

For what it's worth I noticed NewEgg has the 4TB models on sale for $89.99 today. Got an email about it from them.

 

[Zarathustra]

I'm still curious if there is any word on when they cut this change in.

I have a server full of 16 4TB WD Red's.

This is my remote backup server, which uses my old server O used to use for local storage.

Most of them are ~2014 vintage, but at one point I expanded the pool from 12 to 16 drives, and I am concerned that my 4 newest ones are different from the rest and may be predisposed for failure as a result.

I haear what HP is saying. They never claimed the regular Red drives were large scale RAID compatible (I think they suggested keeping pools at 5 drives or below? I can't remember. It was still widely known that they performed beyond what WD specified them for, and enthusiasts have been using them in that manner because of this.

WD are completely within their right to change the specifications of their drives, but for them to make this change without telling anyone is just shameful.

Whenever you make a significant change to a product you need to inform your customers, even if it's not part of the formal specification.

If you are selling a different thing, under the same name as something else before it, there need to be big flashing red lights calling attention to this fact so customers know they have to reassess the suitability of the product, and don't walk into things blind.

I don't care what you are in the business of manufacturing. Any vendor which makes a change without being transparent and announcing that change loud and clear with full disclosure is obviously trying to be sneaky and hide something. In this case WD wanted to save costs by mobving an established product with a good reputation to an inferior technology, and they did so sneakily without telling anyone.

I'm lucky my 12 10TB Seagate Enterprise drives in my current server are working so well, because after this I am inclined to never buy anything from WD ever again.

 

[AntiQuark]

Makes me glad my last 2 drives are older 8TB Hitachi Helium for less money, mfrd before WD started meddling.
WD need to build trust, not this!