WD Knew DM-SMR and ZFS were a bad match!?! WD Red SMR 3

[@ChristianSamsel]

I'd just like to point out that DM SMR is not just for ZFS problematic, but for more or less for all parity raid systems. (It's not great for a raid0/raid1 either)

[@berndeckenfels]

That's basically the intro in the video

[@cataria3903]

@@berndeckenfels yes, but it never hurts to point it out more :D hell i shall even point out, that DM SMR drives are bad for everyone, as the average user using it as a single drive even can have major annoyance and vastly worse issues. it never hurts to point out anti consumer behavior more :) dm smr = bad everyone needs to know (◕‿◕)

[@ChristianSamsel]

@@berndeckenfels true, but ZFS was mentioned like more then a dozen times.

[@TheMrKeksLp]

It's not great for single disks either. Especially random writes which are bad enough on HDDs as it is suffer even more

[@hgbugalou]

Its bad for everything. The only possible advantage is they are cheaper and maybe good as a backup media in external drives that stay offline most of thier life after written to.

[@lordstevewilson1331]

At this point WD has bigger problems, they are getting sued.

[@nash-xn1no]

for

[@beauslim]

They haven't called you because the matter is "before the courts" and their lawyers won't let them. I think you are being *way* too nice. The WD people don't live and work in a vacuum. They knew. Someone weighed profit vs problems and decided to take the risk.

[@ehsnils]

Which have caused the rotating hard disk business to have their Ford Pinto moment.

[@danieledwards3376]

This also seems to be a case of individual vs company interests. Maybe some managers got bonuses out of doing this, but it was a terrible idea for WD to try it. They were bound to get caught eventually and they've squandered a ton of trust in markets (NAS and Enterprise data storage) where trust is important.

[@autohmae]

@@ehsnils Or Boeing 737 MAX

[@advertslaxxor]

@@danieledwards3376 Likely. Everything is about profits. Which is weird, considering how you routinely see sending a case of 40+ 12tb or whatever drives to Linus Tech Tips or whatever to do some NAS build. How hard would it be to send 20 sample drives to major manufacturers so they can actually test them, and list them as compatiable? To boot, these tests can be automated to ridiculous length. To the point where you don't even need to unplug drives to simulate a rebuild, just put in 20 drives, make raid with 8 drives, oh no, drive 2 'failed'!, turn off drive 2, swap with 9, etc. Would go great with marketing, too. Send drives to get tested. Manufacturer tests them. Manufacturer gets to send NAS to reviewers, alongside the test drives they got. Bury the cost in marketing, win-win-win.

[@davethetaswegian]

The cynic in me can't help but feel this was a simple cash grab by WD. SMR boosts capacity over CMR with much the same physical hardware. This can allow for bigger hard drives or cheaper hard drives. It is telling that WD did neither. The 2, 4 and 6TB Red drives don't need this technology unless it is to reduce cost. However, WD did not reduce the price to consumers. So instant increase in profit margin for their highest volume selling NAS drives. I suspect the answer to who is responsible for this mess at WD is the bean counters and upper management.

[@TheMack]

Agreed. "Follow the money" fits here, as for most other dubious things big corporations do. It gets you closer to the truth .

[@dgoncalves81]

Isn't it awfully interesting that WD secretly changed the recording technology only in their mid-tier size range.. as was said, most vendors would only ever test a drive model once and never think about going back It's also fascinating that despite the extra premium and market lead they could have had by introducing at the top of their range: (thus having 20tb+ versus their competitors).. They then decide to limit it to their mid range as they would have known that industry wide it would have generated a lot of questions they couldn't hide behind. Thus, why not cut costs and shaft customers all in a grand conspiracy for a few extra dollars.. (but oh, in "The Office" speak let's call that synegestic efficiencies dividends)

[@xephael3485]

Of course they knew about it, that's why they hid it in specifications. Let's not be idiotic.

[@Anaerin]

Except they didn't. Before this, SMR/CMR was not mentioned AT ALL on the spec sheets for their drives, so you didn't know if it was SMR you were getting.

[@RogerBarraud]

@@Anaerin I think you'll find that's what "hidden" means...

[@ewenchan1239]

You and your team's work on this series is absolutely fantastic. I just finished watching the movie "Dark Waters" and this reminds me so much of that -- where companies were doing things that they probably shouldn't have, all in the name of profits.

[@ask_carbon]

Just saying I appreciate all the work/attention you and your team has put into this. Thanks

[@chaos.corner]

I swore off Seagate drives long ago but I'm thinking about going back to them for the NAS I've been planning on building because of this.

[@diavuno3835]

I run a. It company.... Seagate ironwolf drives are good. Pros are great

[@kwinzman]

Mix drives of different vendors but similar performance in your array so they don't fail at the same time. The answer is not Seagate or WD. The answer is clearly both. Always.

[@kwinzman]

I would support sanctioning WD if there were more copanies to choose from. But unfortunately there are not a lot of independet HDD manufacturers with competitive drives left.

[@chaos.corner]

@@spiralout112 Unfortunately, the use of these drives could compromise your failure tolerance since your array is vulnerable while it rebuilds. And since they've applied it to drives that were not shingled in previous versions, even if you pick one that isn't, who knows what will turn up when you next order a replacement. WD made a big mistake here.

[@IIGrayfoxII]

Same. I didnt recommend Seagate and recommended WD. Them doing this, changed this.

[@tashgordon]

Vote with your money. We purchased Iron Wolfs for a recent update of the storage in our lab specifically because of the way WD this whole thing it.

[@markmathewson1501]

I’ve long used WD drives but if this is their approach then never again

[@RogerBarraud]

Ditto.

[@frustratedalien666]

I've shifted to using Seagate Ironwolf drives for all my NAS needs. I'm done with WD

[@adriansuhr]

WD responsibility is the same as the others companies, they recommended non smr hd the last 15+ years.

[@mannotwiththeplan]

This is nothing introducing a new color won't fix.

[@andibiront2316]

WD Poo Brown and Poo Brown Pro

[@d00dEEE]

@@andibiront2316 Or maybe Moroon.

[@andersfrihagen3656]

Rainbows are in nowadays---

[@WarrenGarabrandt]

@@andibiront2316 lol I was going to suggest brown too. :D

[@RogerBarraud]

@@andibiront2316 WD Enterprise ShitPile TurdBrown...

[@TheFourthWinchester]

Come on. Just cuz some people act nice doesn't mean they aren't trying to fleece you. Western digital definitely knew and did it on purpose. I'm in a conundrum now. Both my Seagate external drives are 4 and 6 years old (both CMR) and idk what to get now.

[@emredrum]

Ironwolf

[@tashgordon]

if they put it on their recommendations/compatability lists, they had to do the integration testing with representable workloads and use cases. Considering the popularity of those previous iteration (CMR) drives at the time it is unlikely they just missed it. This also would've been reflected in their customer releationships.

[@PiperTube]

I complained to WD about the 4 6TB FAX SMR drives I purchased the end of February. I've just now been given an RMA to return them in exchange for 4 6TB WD60EFRX PMR drives. Oh joy, I can imagine the replacement drives will probably be refurbished and not new. No offer was given to me of any pro version.

[@katanasteel]

Efrx drivers only has 64MB cache... (but might work better for you) however if you bought the New reds for the higher cache... then WD is short selling you...

[@boroditsky]

I have a 5 disk drobo device, and replaced some drives with the WD RED SMR drives and had lots of problems. Thankfully, WD RMA'd my 2 x 6 TB Reds with 6 TB Red Pro drives.

[@samuelschwager]

WD is dead to me.

[@francisphillipeck4272]

Same to me. At this point I think ALL spinny rust manufacturers are dead to me.

[@stonent]

I miss Hitachi/HGST as a separate company...

[@uncannyfox]

What drives have you guys been using beside WD?

[@samuelschwager]

@@uncannyfox Seagate. Or if your budget allows for SSDs Samsung.

[@cataria3903]

yes, let's chose a good repsectful harddrive company, that doesn't do this kind of garbage. let's buy an hgst drive! oh wait hgst got bought by wd and seagate and toshiba are just as horrible, although seagate's evil anticonsumer bs has been a bit in the past and today is a bit more generalized, as u know their drives are known to be fast failing utter garbage according to data recovery people, not just my opinion. so sadly we don't really have a choice, that isn't utter shit in the hard drive world. maybe seagate is less full of shit now compared to wd, but that is all debatable.

[@jeremiefaucher-goulet3365]

That'S the case with a lot of companies ;) That's why "The Office" was such a successful show, it's relatable to a lot of people

[@chrismoore9997]

Isn't that interesting... I saw my own face in a KZbin video... I guess I am famous now. The big problem with the Red drives was that WD changed the spec. Originally, none of the Red drives were SMR and they all worked pretty well. After they changed, we had to figure out on our own, because they didn't make it clear in the spec.

[@ziaride]

I had the issue last year (November black friday sales) When I was upgrading my freenas array of 4TB drives to 8TB and migrating the old drives to upgrade an array of 2TB drives. I had 2 rebuilds fail after 4 days. I found if I zeroed out the drive and then rebuilt while it still took over a day it would succeed. Workload on that little pool is mostly read only for Plex data though.

[@mr.needmoremhz4148]

Very nice friendly explanation video. But around 2015 i saw the first KZbin video from a guy describing in detail how bad SMR drives where (for him in rebuilding ). He had a little private data center it seemed and very well aware. I remember it because off the way he visually explained the technique with cut out peaces of paperer and because SMR tech was new to me . Now WD red seems to be very popular in some parts of the world and was marketed toward a NAS audience. Where in others parts they are the most expensive solution and not really marketed as NAS drives. The whole marketing around tech and products for (more) mainstream consumers has bin so misleading and false for years and is only getting worse. I would argue they knew (the technical department) but marketing didn't care and did there thing. People need to learn to do some research them self when it comes to tech and not blindly trust recommendations or wild marketing advertising claims.

[@MyEconomics101]

How do I know I did not buy a WD Red NAS SMR 2-6TB drive? Is there a tool to check the SKU number/serial number of my drive?

[@johnsmith9205]

Hey ServeTheHome, thank you for your video! Has anyone tried using SMR drives as the initial ZFS (Raid Z2) drives, and then replacing the failed drives with CMR drives? How long would it take to re-silver, is it the same nightmare as replacing a failed drive with an SMR drive, or would it be quick enough (e.g. under a day for an 8 TB new drive)?

[@RockTouching]

You said that SMR is needed to achieve bigger capacities...so what is the point of using SMR on smaller drives?

[@PerMejdal]

Less platters = low cost.

[@sean092010]

Lower cost, *maybe* lower power use. That's literally it. Higher capacity per platter means less platters needed, and ultimately lower cost to WD (or Seagate who also uses SMR on consumer drive).

[@dashtesla]

Also I have a 5TB 2.5 inch drive array, certainly not possible without SMR

[@Jr-hv1ct]

WD are replacingthe 4 6 TB smt drives with rectified CMR drives what tests should I run to confirm the are CMR and that the7 are good.

[@Zoltag00]

I suspect (not first hand knowledge, but I know someone who works for a testing company) that companies such as Synology are out-sourcing the testing and providing documentation detailing the specs drives must conform to. The testers would then be plugging drives into test equipment that runs checks on those specific performance characteristics. If the characteristics are met, the drive has passed testing and is confirmed to work. Because the testers don't necessarily know what the drives are being used for, they can only test the drives based on the specs they are given.

[@timlaunyc]

Picked up some 4TB and 10TB Reds a few months ago, very glad none were SMR even though they were going into a traditional RAID array and I would not have been affected by ZFS.

[@berndeckenfels]

It's equally bad for raid, that's what the video mentioned in the beginning is all about.

[@kwinzman]

"Affected by ZFS"? You got that wrong there.

[@leexgx]

Wd red did not tell anyone that they dropped smr secretary (only difference is 256mb cache and, 2 letter change)

[@namyun2743]

Ugh, I can't find any recent 2.5 inch drives that are not SMR...screw the entire HDD industry!

[@tromick]

Indeed. 2TB SMR WD Blue's are big problem. I am using P2P share programs and i do download a lot of mp3's. A lot of read and write going on. Mostly reading because of sharing with other peps. They become RAW in 6 months and it doesn't make sense. I am using them as a offline stroage. I mean i mount them if i need to. Now i use 1TB SMR WD Blue. 6 months passed and thankfully still fine. Like the video said these 2TB SMR's were hot always and deffraging or editing i don't what the fish is doing at the background, once it took 1 days. When i mount back it started again. It is very problematic. Thankfully i don't hear these weird heavy noises or temperature problems on 1TB SMR WD Blue. I have also 1TB PMR WD Blue from 2015 and i must say, it is amazing harddrive. It stops immediately if it doesn't do anything at background. Got more endurance and it is just flows... They need get back these PMR 2.5" back. Once i bought PMR 2.5" WD which it was very thick drive. I couldn't fit the external case, also it was faulty, didn't start so i refund it.

[@coagulateblue]

"longer than my ... well, it was long" ROFL

[@ServeTheHomeVideo]

That almost got edited out. Good thing I at least caught it midway.

[@NickF1227]

Lol

[@Robert-ug5hx]

I hope they drop the smr off the nas lineup, I was going to upgrade to larger drives and discovered this while shopping around, and the fact the red pluses cost more to me is a problem having to pay extra to fix their mess

[@paulstubbs7678]

I seem to remember Seagate bringing out a 10TB SMR drive years ago, it was quite a jump in capacity at the time. However Seagate went to great pains to say that this was a new recording technology, and that it WAS NOT suitable for heavy usage - i.e. NAS etc. and that it was only to be used for very light duty archival type jobs. So why is WD using it in much lower capacity drives, like their 4TB Red drives? 4TB is easily attainable with CMR, so why? The conspiracy theorist inside of me keeps saying, "to save costs/make more money with less"

[@IIGrayfoxII]

How did WD get away with saying their compatible? IMO Self Certification with no real testing. Like how Boeing got away with saying the 737 Max 8 is "safe and good"

[@alaricaakova6652]

Does the WD gold line use CMR or SMR ?

[@johncnorris]

I'm wondering if many of the drives that were shucked were also SMR HDDs? It would explain why they were cheaper.

[@ServeTheHomeVideo]

We tested some from last year. Will and I talked today about getting some to test as well. I tend to use shucked drives a lot.

[@johncnorris]

@@ServeTheHomeVideo - I'd like to hear the results of those tests. I'm wondering if the statistics are going to be skewed because of the global human malware issue?

[@ServeTheHomeVideo]

@@johncnorris We did not see them in last year's samples we got. Still, I want to get a more current set of drives to test on.

[@andibiront2316]

I really don't get how a 10TB external drive with enclosure, cables, bigger packaging and USB controller is cheaper than a 10TB internal hard drive. Internal HDDs are extremely overpriced in some cases.

[@cataria3903]

@@ServeTheHomeVideo yes please test them and if possible show people an easy way to identify if a drive is SMR or not for shucking to, if u hopefully will make a video about testing some new shucked drives. would be really lovely if possible :)

[@BlackfurysPlayground]

So, I need to replace a WD red 3 TB with CMR. What do I do? Pro is too expensive, especially since 3 TB Pro don't seem to exist. Mixing vendors is discouraged, but probably still the lesser of the two evils, right?

[@Gastell0]

5:55 - SMR necessary for higher capacities - 4TB SMR HDD, super capacity fuck yeah! Said non-one in 2019...

[@michaelfitzgeraldnet]

How does dm-smr go with storage-spaces?

[@Wahinies]

Parity storage spaces are already dog slow and the poor full drive writes of DM-SMR means it'll be bad for simple or mirror spaces as well

[@michaelfitzgeraldnet]

@@Wahinies so how r u meant to use these drives?

[@Wahinies]

@@michaelfitzgeraldnet hopefully not at all, try to avoid if you are able to.

[@happygimp0]

Where is SMR more problematic when i rebuild a RAID? When the old disks have SMR or when the new disk has SMR?

[@diavuno3835]

It's still no good... Is replace the drives with new ones

[@rdwatson]

When the new disk has SMR. The problem with SMR is slowness when writing large amounts of data.

[@leexgx]

Yep it can take take days(3-9 days on smr) vs 8-24 hours (cmr/pmr) This is depending on disk size and how much data is stored on the array, as the wd red smr disk is smart enough to ignore zero bytes writes (if you rebuild an empty array you might find it actually rebuilds the array faster on smr but depends on what the nas array does when it's rebuilding)

[@user-fs2zt4tk6q]

if you're using cheap smr hdds you should be saving enough to be able to use 2 way mirroring instead of parity

[@omarpagan3007]

@servethehomevideo i have two synology NAS's FULL [23] of these drives, any suggestions on how to get WD to replace them for me? Ive been using them since about 2015 when i started getting into Synology NAS's.

[@ossme]

I had the same issue with the software raid on my windows workstation.

[@velcadegaming4133]

How makes quality ~4TB NAS drives? I have 4 of the WD drives in my FreeNAS server, I believe they're older but it's still a concern.

[@RogerBarraud]

Do your research.

[@Stefan_Payne]

I had an Issue with an SMR Drive as well. So I imaged my Windows Installation onto an SMR Drive. Then I tried to copy the Steam version of FInal Fantasy 14 from either a 15mm/2,5" 2TB Toshiba (USB) Drive or a 500GB Samsung T5. And it stopped at 0kb/sec for a while... So with SMR, I'd say we need a different style to write, with bigger data. ZFS isn't optimized for that (yet) and its probably similar for RAID Controllers.

[@hahaha10001]

Are there physical differences between an SMR and CMR drives? An extra screw or different controller? Why can't a firmware update fix this?

[@leexgx]

Smr is physically different from cmr/pmr, (it has 100gb of normal zone and then the rest of space as smr zone) when the drive is receiving constant writes (like when rebuilding your array after a failed disk) it will go very slow (0-10MB/s from its normal 130-150MB/s speed)

[@WorBlux]

In theory a firmware update could fix it, but you'd lose a good bit of capacity. Though something like that (Hybrid Host Managed SMR, )is the proper way to introduce SMR into the market. They behave as CMR if you don't do anything special. If you're software supports zone commands, then you can disable CMR logical address ranges, and trade it for a bigger chunk of addresses on the same physical sector to be writtens as SMR.

[@tanmaypanadi1414]

good points and happy to subscribe and like the video (comment for the algorithm)

[@azmodanpc]

It was intentional, here in EU, SMR disks are now sold consistently cheaper than their CMR counterparts.Why discount your stuff If it's newer and in the same NAS line (up to 8 disks)?

[@stonent]

So now comes the other problem. When they try to make HM-SMR the norm. You basically lock out any kind of legacy RAID controller at that point. All hardware RAID card vendors need new firmware and new processors to handle the load of HM-SMR across an array. WD is already selling HM-SMR drives in some USB products that require you to load the HM-SMR software on the computer. Now the plus side would be that the RAID card or NAS / SAN OS knows how to move the data around effectively. It may not be necessary to rewrite certain data blocks that are marked free by the OS. Maybe some kind of mid-point could be reached where the drives have something similar to an SSD re-trim to let the drive know of areas of the file system that are free so it doesn't rewrite them when it's re-shingling the data.

[@AllanSavolainen]

Please give link to this HM-SMR USB drive.

[@eDoc2020]

The main in-between is called host-aware SMR. Legacy hosts can treat it as a conventional drive while SMR-optimized systems get the host-managed benefits. Although I see no reason why they couldn't also include TRIM. And I second the previous commenter. What USB HM-SMR products has WD released?

[@WorBlux]

@@eDoc2020 An alternative in-between is hybrid host-managed, that acts like CMR until the software specifically activates regions of the drive as SMR. And many if not most of drive manages SMR drives include trim support. It helps, but not that much. The re-mapping overhead and write amplification get really bad after a while on heavy write workloads. The internal latency and size of the buffers needed make if very slow to re-write the large tracks used. To really get decent performace you'd need a significant flash/optane/ReRAM cache. But that cost money, more so than just adding that extra platter. And for drive-managed SMR to work, SMR clusters have to be fairly small, reducing the actual amount of capacity gain you can get. They are a product that is penny-wise but pound foolish in may cases. And I third the previous commenters. What USB HM-SMR products has WD released?

[@brandonedwards7166]

This is not the first time WD has done something similar. Back in 2011 with the green drives. I bought 5, 2tb for a raid 5 array and they kept getting corrupted.

[@TurboBass]

I couldn't find anything worthwhile about DM-SMR and a comparison to standard SMR when it comes to overall sustained performance with data re-write and whatnot. I still can't find any real useful info but thanks to your video it sounds like DM-SMR isn't substantially better and so still a no fly zone.

[@ThatWilsonGuyvids]

Now the question is are the Easystore WDxxxEMAZ white label drives commonly shucked for cheap NAS storage SMR. The performance of my own NAS would say yes, but I'm not sure and I don't know how to find out.

[@BlenderRookie]

The problem is conventional wisdom told me that my WD reds were NOT SMR. WD didn't lie but I do think their omission was meant to be deceptive. Leaves a bad taste. BTW, my WD reds are 5 years old and still working fine. But it's getting close to time to replace them. WD seems less appealing this time around.

[@tommihommi1]

nobody with the knowledge how bad these drives are had the guts or the position to just be outspoken about it inside the company and stop it before it reached customers, that means they really need some restructuring

[@cataria3903]

no no, it is way more likely, that all of the backlash and lawsuits were expected. WD is very likely playing the longterm game here, of increasing profits by pushing customers to higher tier drives, just for CMR as well as increasing profits as SMR garbage is cheaper to produce of course and gets sold at the same price as CMR. they likely had a 5 to 10 year plan, that included all of these reactions and it was an acceptable small loss in profits short term for a longterm gain in profits. that is what i would imagine happened. so people very well might have spoken out about this internally. hell engineers might ahve been shouting from the rooftops, but all this could have been very known and deliberately ignored, because of longterm profits are more important than customer data of course for western digital. (and seagate and toshiba too of course though make no mistake about that)

[@ozoak]

I've been trying to keep up to date with this, and I've got a question: what *are* SMR drives good for? Honestly I've struggled to come up with a use case where SMR drives are a good solution.

[@takeshi7]

Cheap write once archive storage.

[@LethalBB]

IMO you're being soft on WD. Seriously shady.

[@jodajackson4489]

Yeah, the WD response delay is likely due to them working on their response. That, and they are currently in litigation as they are being sued over this.

[@JohnTaylorDev]

Can’t get notifications for your channel, is your ‘made for kids’ setting enabled for some reason?

[@ИванБрагин]

Why not make Intel Optane 5,25" (without controller) ?

[@ИванБрагин]

When will Intel stop eating money?

[@mg42sd]

Mine is 777 like. My life just got a little brighter.

[@NicolaiSyvertsen]

So why can't they start selling host managed drives then? (other than to select enterprise customers) filesystems are ready to implement support for it. It is the same stupid as with 4k native sector drives that are much harder to source than 512e drives. Both technologies should be ubiquitous now.

[@eDoc2020]

I don't think that is a very fair comparison. As far as I can tell (please enlighten me if mistaken) there is no reason to want 4kn over 512e drives but there is a clear advantage to host managed (or at least host aware) SMR. So yes, where are all the host managed and host aware SMR drives?

[@rockyhighwayroad7365]

WD got class action lawsuit over these RED SMR drives.

[@dell177]

Dollars to donuts this new scheme costs a nickle less and the accounting dept has a lot more say than the engineering dept.

[@albundy7718]

I hope the loss of Reputation was worth it, WD.

[@Vatharian]

I can already see the narration - 'don't use ZFS, it's bad FS.', 'It's not WD Red SMR is bad for ZFS, it's ZFS is bad for WD Red'. I can smell same crap as when HDD manufacturers pushed SI Gigabytes down our throats.

[@thebillykeys]

Dunder Mifflin SMR?

[@RogerBarraud]

SMH more like :-(

[@station240]

I suspect WD don't really have a Red division, a Blue division, a Black division. It's more like different groups for each research project. So there is a group for 2 to 6tb SMR drive research/production. Each group try to promote their own project to get it into mass production. For whatever reason management decided they could get away with using SMR drives in NAS/Raid. Obviously it's blown up in their faces, just like the silver plated contacts that Bricked Green HDDs and now WD only brand SSDs as Green.

[@MoraFermi]

Can you guys possibly check out how bcachefs is working with WD smr drives? I've been trying it out with Seagate's 2.5" SMR drives (ironically, I thought they'd be slowest and most troublesome!) and the results were promising. Sadly, looking at my current results, I suspect that they were promising simply because my SMR drives weren't sucky enough. :-/

[@berndeckenfels]

Mora Fermi if you have no sustained ongoing writes (like you get from raid rebuilds) you should be fine, with caches the writes and rewrites are reduced, so SMB is less of a problem (however you should not use a non-raid volume in most cases)

[@lordstevewilson1331]

Its like you are buying a 400bhp v8 car, and they give you 300bhp inline 4 car.

[@ServeTheHomeVideo]

I would liken it to like you were buying a 400HP electric car, and found out that there was a 400HP V8 driving it. Tests saw it was a car, and it had 400HP, but were not looking for the engine type.

[@octapc]

Way back in the 90s WD kicked Seagate in the teeth for reliability. Seagate couldn't beat them, bought them out. Now we have crap and crap

[@KuraIthys]

Early on WD had a bad reputation for something called 'sticktion'. (pretty much what it sounds like. The drive heads would get stuck and do bad things to the drive) But my experiences with Seagate in the early 2000's were an absolute atrocity. Some of the worst hardware failures I've ever had. We're not talking data corruption or bad sectors or a gradual failure. We're talking instant sudden failure of the entire drive mechanism, meaning your 'easiest' option for any kind of data recovery is a full on head swap, which... Requires a clean room, and it only gets worse from there... Yeah, Seagate's failures were... On another league... I'm saddened that these two companies are all that's left now...

[@Eyetrauma]

“The NAS vendors just don’t [have resources necessary to test the drives].” Well dang, maybe they should consider a new line of work then, huh. I don’t want this to sound personal but IMO you’re being way too deferential to WD on this. This is completely typical shuck and jive business nowadays and they’re upset that they got caught, end of story.

[@TheMack]

Agreed, A company like Synology should definitely have the manpower to do extensive testing. Just look at KZbinrs like Gamers Nexus or Der8auer, they can do detailed testing of 30 motherboards in a single video, surely Synology could do some harddrive testing as well. Hope they start doing that now.

[@rockyhighwayroad7365]

I have a theory too. Some sneaky marketing Jew did it.

[@Evertb1]

Money talks. Just don't buy them. I have been a happy user of WD reds in my FreeNAS boxes for years. And I promoted them to everybody who wanted my advice. Not anymore. I just replaced some "end of life" drives in one of my boxes with Iron Wolfs. I don't want to look at a table with specs to find out if the drive with the capacity I need is CMR or SMR.

[@rodfer5406]

Damn..

[@shadow.banned]

Suits, man... suits...

[@HavokR505]

this is an awfully long way to say that everybody knew they were shit but the vendors and WD didnt care because 95% of their customers wouldnt know any better anyways nor would they notice a difference. but im sure if u called WD out, you wouldnt be getting much support from them so...i get it.

[@Afd2673]

WD Red NAS Hard Drive WD20EFAX non adatto al nas synology attenzione!!!

[@geckorinda9714]

smr=mcas

[@mspencerl87]

Dislikes WD execs

[@aukk8300]

hard drives are barbaric relics now. time to move on. tape is the future of cold storage as it offers 100x surface area in a comparable size package, and anything remotely caring about performance should be SSD. hard drives are gonna get more and more expensive as they lose volume and the war of attrition takes its toll on their supply chain.

[@mannotwiththeplan]

HDD is the middle ground between tape and SSD. There are a lot of people fit in that middle ground until SSD is even close to price.

[@Stars-Mine]

Sure, tape is for cold storage, these NAS units and raid arrays are not cold storage so...

[@aukk8300]

@@mannotwiththeplan "There are a lot of people fit in that..." no, but the replies, and votes to my post does indicate indeed that "There are a lot of people who are delusional about HDD TCO", and "There remains a lot of ppl who are clueless about what has happened to HDD volume and their supply chain, and will religiously repeat what they were taught years ago because thats how humans work" for this reason, and not for actual value reasons HDD will linger on for a few more years, while its customers get scammed left right center over a new problem everyday.

[@AllanSavolainen]

Just wait until we get SMR tapes :)

[@eDoc2020]

The problem with tape is the drives are much more expensive. Tape only makes sense for storing huge amounts of data and it still is useless for random access. Hard drives are still several times cheaper than SSDs so in my opinion they still make sense where response times barely matter. Applications like DVRs are a good example. When hard drives and SSDs reach price parity, I will totally agree with you. Until then, hard drives have their place.

[@ShababAshique]

Try to make videos under 5 minutes. Way too much talking in your videos. Really annoying.