WD Red NAS Drives and SMR - UPDATE

[@midiman5045]

DIsk manage SMR is not the point the point is they sold SMR drives to users that were not knowing. If you had a colo of nas'e and you replaced drives not knowing they old ones were SMR versus CMR. It's just not right nor ethical. You were buying a product that you thought was one thing then turned out to be another.

[@panoshountis1516]

I have been a strong advocate of WD on all configurations I have had over past 20+ years, either on desktop PC, NAS, USB storage, etc. and I am just about to upgrade to a new NAS. This whole shenanigan with the SMR had me converted to IronWolves. For your tests, I'd suggest also doing system response times one while the system performs a RAID rebuild but with significant space allocation (say 75%+).

[@Felix-ve9hs]

The Western Digital WD Red with the "EFAX" in the Serial Number are SMR, the ones with "EFRX" are not

[@SrChalice]

Thank you

[@jazzypenguin4401]

Wrong. The WD120EFAX is CMR

[@DjRavix]

I currently have trouble with 4 WD red 4 tb drives manufactured on 18/19 Jan 2020 The array completely crashed in both raid5 and raid6 I am currently in contact with WD about this and am trying to get them replaced since I can unfortunately not trust these drives for my usage... in the past I always had very good experience with there drives and this is the first time in 22 years that I see WD drives fail ... even my old 2.5gb drive from 22 years ago is still working today !!!

[@jinx0192]

What model numbers are on your drives? I just bought a wd red 4tb drive model# wd40efax. I learned it's one of the smr drives. Not happy. I'm going to try and return it. What a mess.

[@CulturedThugPoster]

I found out that the 4x3GB WD Red Nas HDD I bought last year are all CMR .. I think SMR starts at 4GB at least for recent batches.

[@Felix-ve9hs]

@@CulturedThugPoster Gigabyte? Not Terabyte? 😁

[@dim3nt0]

smr or not, things sometimes fail.. its not an indication of anything.. i still prefer wd and even toshiba over seagate.. smr may not be a good fit for raid and they should have it written somewhere

[@andibiront2316]

Again... SMR uses PMR, but the tracks overlap. The tracks are still perpendicular, is a different way to write but still PMR. That is why, for disambiguation, we now use "CMR" to identify non-SMR disks. Also, DM-SMR is not better, it's just compatible. Enterprise grade SMR drives are host managed, there is a nice explanation about this from HGST on KZbin. High end cold storage and backup solutions that use enterprise grade 14+TB are HM-SMR. Another edit... Do you not see an issue here? There is a problem with high intensity random write on SMR disks, ok? It's not a problem but a characteristic of this type of drive we should say. WD is selling this drives for up to 8-bay drive usage, and say "but if you want to really write a lot to them randomly buy Red Pro or enterprise grade or don't complain". Ok, so you bought 8 to keep your photos, movies and media... 3 years passed and you have 60% utilization on the drives... and one goes down. You replace it with a new one, exact same model... The freaking rebuild process is the definition of random write usage!! And this is what people is observing right now. On ZFS the drives constantly fail. On consumer grade NAS it's entirely up to the controller decision if it decides to "fail" and drop out a HDD that takes several seconds to respond to IO, those that don't fail will success rebuilding the drive in maybe one week!! It crawls, to the point of being unresponsive for seconds. The most critical moment in a RAID is when you are rebuilding the array to replace a disk failure and you want it to end ASAP, with your CMR drives it takes 12, 24, 36hs... not 5, 7, 10 days! My NAS is based on ZFS, 8 HDDs on a SAS controller... this drives simply FAIL on ZFS while the older 4TB Reds worked just fine. If one of my drives fails and I replace it via RMA, the replacement WON'T WORK.

[@styrkhenrikfinne8025]

I can confirm brand new 4TB WD Red Fail massively on ZFS Particularly on scrub

[@abucketofelves]

Mine are all ASMR, they're constantly clicking and tapping.

[@Eideen]

My bigest problem with WD approach has been that WD have used the same marked name for both SMR and PMR. WD needs to use a different marked name for there RED SMR drives, like "RED value" or "RED archive". So we who are in the area between very low random write needs of "RED value" and very high writes of RED-PRO, need the WD RED to be PMR. This will also make it easy to recommend a type of disk. it is very hard to requirement WD RED if you have to spesifi "WDx0EFRX" for disk between 2-6 TB and WDx0EFAX for the any other size, for that medium load type in between "RED value" and RED PRO. Any re-build tests need be with different levels of random writes/load of the "RED value" in a raid: - "none" (only for secondary storage, cold storage) - "minimum" (like a clean synology install), - "normal" (synology with docker, photostation and othere DB packages, photo editing, video editing, game storage, small VMS, unifi controlles) - "heavy" (heavy DB usage).

[@TechyBen]

Like selling cars with snow tires on for decades, then silently dropping the "feature" as it was never promised or listed on the cars specs. Then people wonder why they skid and crash when it snows. Then the company going "your using it wrong". Well, they kinda led the customer up that track and bamboozled them.

[@longnamedude3947]

I'm interested to see now if similar marketing tactics have been undertaken with WD's Flash-based Storage devices. What do I mean by this statement?: Well, as you may or may not know, SSDs use NAND Flash as their medium of choice for storing data, NAND Flash comes in different forms, with the four main varieties that are used in the production of SSDs being - SLC, MLC, TLC, and lastly, QLC. SLC - Single Layer Cells, are by far the fastest form of traditional Flash memory used on consumer SSDs, it is also the most expensive, and ironically, the oldest style/form of Flash memory used on modern day retail SSDs. MLC - Multi Layer Cells, are not quite as fast as SLC based SSDs, usually coming in at roughly half the maximum throughput on some common SSD read and write speed tests VS SLC-based SSDs, the advantage is they are twice as dense, so you get more Gigibytes of storage space per $1 USD (One US Dollar). TLC - Triple Layer Cells, these are still very common SSDs, they are essentially the same concept as MLC is to SLC, slower but with a higher storage density, and, cheaper to produce. QLC - Quad Layer Cells, these are currently the slowest and cheapest types of common NAND Flash used on consumer oriented SSDs, they are much slower than the previously mentioned technologies while only being slightly cheaper to the consumers RRP (Manufacturers of SSDs still get a healthy chunk of profit from using QLC over other types of NAND Flash). So why have I listed all of the information above? Well it is quite simple really, manufacturers of SSDs (Western Digital will be used as an example in this case) state that the SSD they sell to you uses a particular type of NAND Flash memory and DRAM cache, my question is: Are these manufacturers telling us the truth, not do they perform, but rather, are they being honest? Knowing how Western Digital have handled this current situation I am inclined to believe that they may be doing a similar "Deliberate Denial" tactic with their SSD lineups. It is worth some investigating. Thanks, and take care.

[@neilm9400]

The fact is that WD only owned up to this after they were caught. When I buy hard drives I don't expect the product to change over time. Also the hard drives I buy are sometimes used for many years and over time their usage case may change. So I need to be able to trust that I am getting a similar product. As you pointed out, these are NAS drives for use in NAS products. The question is, why would they change if they felt there wasn't something in it for them, since if it was for the consumer benefit it would have been broadcast far and wide in a deluge of marketing bumpf. Lets hope Seagate have taken onboard this misstep by WD. I have about 15 Reds at home in various configs, so when they get cycled out then it will no longer be a straight forward purchase decision.

[@phildavis8732]

IronWolf are all CMR. 4tb+ Health Management and Rotational vibration sensors so you can build to scale on a budget. Then the cost is generally less. Seagate is the better buy if you take emotion of previous purchases out of the equation. That's my view.

[@karim1485]

Phil I have owned 3 Seagate HDDs, all bought new and two of them have not survived half of their capacity being written to. Both are external drives that have never been moved around and always treated like bare eggs. I am just starting to get my first server running (unraid, personal use) and i have serious trust issues... now wds move makes a choice really difficult. Had no issues with wd yet

[@Larwood.]

Yeah exactly, putting SMR in NAS drives at all is questionable. Doing it without telling anyone is very scummy. Actively and deliberately hiding that information from people when they started to realise something was wrong is... well I don't want to say unforgivable, but it's damn close to it.

[@phildavis8732]

@@karim1485 this post is about NAS drives not external drives. External hard drives are the entry form of storage on HDD. If your buying NAS drives Seagate hands down. I've never had a problem with Seagate. However, I was burnt by a WD drive and lost lots of data and that was my lesson learned to back up data after that school boy error. As you said treated it carefully. Rarely moved and powered on every so often.

[@TheSiriusEnigma]

SMR is for long therm storage. It is sub performant for standard access, but works. So single drive and RAID 1 are tolerable. For RAID 0, 3, 5, 6, 50, 60 and other flavours, SMC can crash the raid array because of their incredible long latency on multiple small writes. Good RAID controllers will kick the drive out as defective. The problem is that WD is selling NAS specific HDD with SMC technology and hiding it. Using a SMC drive in a NAS that are almost guaranteed RAID, is like selling a sport car with a low under power economy engine. Then arguing that you don’t need a performance engine because of speed limits and stuff. Knowing that you would never have bought the car if you knew what the engine was. Make no mistake, HDD manufacturers are making an effort to hide the fact that their drives are SMC. Because they are a lot cheaper to make but clients don’t want them.

[@lukaszbien2904]

Had issues for last couple of months with 4TB version on software RAID10 in dell 11G. Raid controller H700 was marking those drives as failed after database imports... will have to contact WD about this, as these servers are used daily and we need some reliance in that matter... thank you for the info.

[@TechyBen]

"But your honour, when I swapped the customers car for a different one, the customer never noticed, so it's not a crime, it's a feature". "It's good, they should have brought it early doors". Downvote, because 18 months is "good"? The apologies for this stockholm syndrome is amazing. XD

[@mtodak1]

Have SMR WD Red drives in home environment but constantly recording from 2 cameras to Synology NAS- should I be worried?

[@josevalenzuela142]

Depends bro, are you recording something that you need to preserve forever? Or is it just daily monitoring and you expect the data to be there in case or robbery? If no long term use is expected, you should be fine, especially if using them in without a RAID, video surveillance video recording is mostly linear writing of data.. in fact, I presume that whoever took this stupid decision at WD was banking on most of these REDs to be used for video surveillance and expected that no one would notice outside isolated use cases. The problem is with constantly writing mixed locations in the drives, for example, if you had SMR disks, and you were using it for something data intensive like a database in a NAS running a website with a RAID array and you expected the data to be intact a year from now, do backups, expand capacity, etc, that's were you would be in trouble...

[@AllanSavolainen]

I've noticed that SMR drives work fine as long as you have separate SLOG and CACHE devices when using ZFS. I am using 16GB Optane SLOG and 20GB Intel SSD as CACHE with my 4 x 8TB WD SMR drives with (and Seagate on another NAS) ZFS raidz and write performance is just fine and reads are fine too. Without SLOG I've noticed slowdowns and hiccups even over 1Gbps network. Though I am only using 2.5Gbps NICs, but performance is very similar to another NAS box which has 4 x 2TB CMR drives in MD-Raid5.

[@mrfrenzy.]

This is a perfect solution for large storage size on a budget with the added benefit of improved performance. I can also recommend increasing zfs_dirty_data_max = 4G and recordsize=1M. I am using a bunch of 2.5" 5TB Seagate SMR drives with NVME SLOG and L2ARC.

[@PitboyHarmony1]

About to order a 4 Bay Synology NAS, so in prep already received 2 EFAX 4TB drives (before this revelation came out), and plan to order 2 more to fill out the system (knowing its always best to keep all drives the same). I appreciate the $ savings ($50 per drive in Canada) for these drives over the CMR option. Adds up to $200 I dont need to spend. This will be only a home based backup system (files, photos, archive etc), so there will never be a need for high speed continuous read/writing. In my case these shingle SMR drives will do just fine, as there will be lots and lots of idle time. This is WD's bad to not be clear up front, and its obvious that some business users could be in a bind with this, but in my case I'm not going to send drives back, toss them out and swear off WD as a whole, as in the end they will suit my application just fine, and I appreciate the $ savings. For people in the same boat as I, using these drives as I will, there is really no benefit in jumping on the 'boycott WD' bandwagon for its own sake. I saved money ... period, and the decision creates no additional risk.

[@CulturedThugPoster]

As far as I understand it is during tasks that are I/O intensive or during re-silvering (rebuilding the RAID after failure) is when SMR can be problematic. As the old saying goes though, having 1 back-up isn't safe, if those files are valuable you need at least 3x redundancy on 3 different systems.

[@Larwood.]

But the SMR drives aren't cheaper to buy. When they introduced the SMR drives they weren't cheaper, and the equivalent Seagates which are CMR tend to be slightly cheaper (~2% from what I've seen)

[@AndrewFremantle]

@@Larwood. You're absolutely wrong about Seagates being CMR. All of Seagates consumer-focused drives have been SMR for years, they just refuse to fess up. How do you think they're always cheaper than WD?

[@AndrewFremantle]

@@CulturedThugPoster Its going to entirely depend on how writes are done. If they're done as constant sequential writes SMR should be mostly fine. It's when you have a large number of small random writes that SMR shits the bed. Like ZFS Resilvers for instance.

[@Larwood.]

@@AndrewFremantle any evidence?

[@SocialWorkProfessor]

Given the controversy, I think I'd like to transition to Ironwolf. Does anyone know if I can mix and match, i.e., rebuild my SHR with a new drive from a different brand?

[@SocialWorkProfessor]

Made the transition. No problems at all with mixing and matching different brands.

[@badshotuk72]

Ive got a couple of 4Tb red's in an old synology nas, how can i see if mine are running SMR?

[@UrikKane]

"EFRX" are non smr, the newer EFAX model is smr - from what I know

[@badshotuk72]

@@UrikKane thanks for that buddy I've just checked mine in the Synology app, mine are EFRX

[@augurseer]

@@badshotuk72 how do we check? I have some in my Synology NAS. 4 x 4 TB

[@neilm9400]

@@augurseer Pop you drive out and you will be able to see on the label EFRX or EFAX as part of the model name.

[@haukionkannel]

SMR is ”new” technology so if you have old stuff you will be fine.

[@ierosgr]

Old video but I m going to give it a shot. So enterprise sata and sas drives like HGST HUH721212AL5200 that WD states them as PMR are DM-SMR? I don t think so even if in the datasheet only state PMR. PS I know the presentation here is for WD Reds but found it relevant.

[@axel9248]

So I decide yo buy Seagate Skyhawk 4Tb that is made ir for video security systems, I can check it in Seagate page it is CMR one. I want to use this disks for a NAS system, which problems I can found with this purpose with surveillance disks? Thanks

[@alessandrozigliani2615]

If they are cmr no problem at all.

[@AmitAlmani]

Is this video sponsored by WD??:( , can't you see what wrong about them telling only part of the true?

[@dalgrim]

Raid rebuild with concurrent access! When you running the rebuild be sure to have a script or program running that continues to write/read data from the unit! Seeing as these “Stupid Mangled Recording” drives take 15x longer to rebuild than a true CMR drive... Also in a real life situation you can’t have a week of downtime while your array rebuilds. Not only that while it is rebuilding you are at a seriously increased risk of data loss as a single additional failure will cause permanent unrecoverable data loss.

[@pgotze]

Hey man, why do you discuss that much, if result is simple. WD just decided to lower costs and sell worse product for same money, like previous product of better parameters. Its so simple, quietly reduced costs and made worse product and asking you same money, not telling you, that parameters are different. What is the benefit of this change to customer? What benefit does customer have from this great new WD RED NAS 2TB - 6TB discs? Absolutely no benefit and WD or you can talk hours and hors about this simplicity - WD decided to fuck up with customers and earn more money. WD is dead company for me personally.

[@deejeemadrox1866]

Seagate should be just as dead then, or Toshiba!

[@pgotze]

@@deejeemadrox1866 Seagate disc ranges recommended by Seagate for NAS does NOT use SMR.

[@AndrewFremantle]

SMR allows drives to be cheaper. Why do you think Seagate SMR drives are consistently cheaper than WDs offerings? Seagate has been putting SMR in consumer-market drives for years now without disclosing that fact.

[@pgotze]

@@AndrewFremantle What NAS series of Seagate use SMR? There is is no such series. IronWolf is NAS series and here you dont see SMR drives. And price? Not true, in eShop older WD RED CMR and new WD RED SMR drive is almost same price, but cheaper technology. They switched quietly. Its just like that, WD is just cheat, they started to sell worse product under same naming with same price, even if this SMR is not for NAS devices at all.

[@VeritronX]

I have a raidz2 setup with 10x 3tb cmr red's, what happens when one or two of them die and the only reds I can replace them with are SMR? does it rebuild successfully every time? do I loose performance?

[@drticzon]

What date month and year did WD switch to SMR so we can check our HD.

[@karim1485]

Wd40efax is smr, wd40efrx is cmr

[@life-is-std]

the management part is where silent data corruption occurs. For example you have zfs or btrfs array of 8 drives. Both filesystems have corruption protection mechanisms that will detect drive failures. If the filesystems are doing data movement them self they will detect that the target has not been written properly and will cancel the operation however if the device does data movements a bit flip in the read data will not be detected and the copy will be corrupted. Having a very full disk will lead to more data corruption because the affected disk area will be used frequently. I'm sure there are safeguards in place in the management firmware but I doubt they are sophisticated enough

[@scoty_does]

Drive managed SMR if it did it right, would be invisible. But if its noticable/measurable its not doing it well enough.

[@UghZug]

Class action soontm.

[@RN1441]

It seems like this technology is OK for JBOD use but a ticking time bomb for any RAID level with parity?

[@nufgorf]

Seagate snuck SMR drives out in some of thier USB 3 bricks - there are 2 versions available here in Australia - 4tb USB 3 drives are either AU$99 or AU$160 - turns out the $99 ones are DM-SMR. At least the price difference was passed on to the consumer, and for 99% of users its not an issue for a USB 3 brick. I found this out when I put a heavy load on one backing up a SATA drive of 3.5tb directly to the 4tb drive - it disconnected with a "drive not ready failure" at round 500gb! When checked, there was nothing showing as an error - I ended up shucking the drive to test it directly - no errors. I had purchased 3 of these cheap drives, so I duplicated what had caused the error on a different drive and found the same thing. By putting data across in 400gb chunks, the drive works flawlessly! So WD is not the only one, and personally I found DM-SMR can still cause issues under heavy loads in JBOD as well as RAID. Knowing these issues, I can happily work around them for a drive thats 30% cheaper and is normally only used as a cold archive. However, it did ruin my plans to eventually shuck them and move them into a unRAID PLEX server down the track.

[@giornikitop5373]

@@nufgorf you missed the point.we are talking about NAS drives not external. none of the seagate nas series has smr. wd has replaced cmr nas with smr (same product, same series, NAS series, no clear indication apart from a sticker) and tryed to get away with it with excuses, once arrays started to fail. also most external drives from any company (wd, seagate, samsung etc usb3 of course) i have used, has indeed trouble with writing large amounts of data at once (anything over ~200GB was my exp, depends on the number of files and their size). external drives are just for simple, small size backups. and that's why most ppl who shunked these, had bad experience using them in busy arrays. but that's also why external drives are cheaper than nas drives.

[@nufgorf]

@@giornikitop5373 I have 3 NAS boxes here, 2 running WD RED drives, so I am aware of the differences. The substitution of DM SMR without advising the purchaser is a plague that extends over much more than just the WD RED NAS drives, altho obviously WD has taken that grey area and turned it into a set of lawsuits from ripped off customers. The dodgy WD RED SMR drives technicly only have issues with RAID - ( I mean I have seen reports of 9 days to resilver a 4 bay NAS VS 17 hours with CMR drive! ) not NAS inherently. Running a NAS in JBOD is perfectly feasable (NAS number 3 at my place ) but obviously is not suited for most applications. Also - quite a few people "shuck" these USB 3 bricks as a source of cheap HDD's - after all, a PLEX server running 2 or 3 hours a day to stream a couple of TV shows doesn't justify the extra cost of dedicated NAS drives for many people. These drive purchasers sure as heck will have issues if they slot them into a ZFS RAID array where CMR versions would happily cope for years.

[@giornikitop5373]

@@nufgorf yeah, correct, in most simple situations, smr arrays would not have a problem (i also have one) that's why i said "busy" arrays (have 2, one never recovered, but thankfully 3-2-1 saved me). i guess the main reason this is blown, is because these are selled as "nas" drives and nas has a very wide spectrum of applications, from simple backup-archive to very intensive i/o deployments. wd just says up to 8 drives max if i'm not mistaken and that's the only limit according to them. if wd had put on a clear indication or something that said "for light i/o usage only" or something along those lines noone would complain, but they would have lost sales and/or profit, so.... i believe that the lawsuits are more due to the danger of data loss that wd put the customers in and not so much for the prices but eitherway. too bad because wd red was always a compelling and pretty favored line of drives but now it might not recover in the eyes of the customers.

[@jinx0192]

Isn't Seagate, and Toshiba doing the same thing? SMR drives from them too on the lower terabyte models?

[@rflair]

Seagate doesn't sell any SMR drive to be used in a NAS.

[@leexgx]

Only on barracuda it has hidden smr on there 2-4-5-8tb hdds blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-barracuda-and-desktop-hdd-smr/ Seagate enterprise or nas drives are cmr (unless its the archive drives witch are fully open that they are smr)

[@MrGriims]

what happen if u have both smr cmr types in a sh-2 raid with 10 disk

[@aware24]

I can’t hear any background noise at all, you ok? Hallucinations now?

[@verify8295]

It is including external like mybook ?

[@philyoung4238]

Can you test windows storage spaces. Add/remove drives. Optimize

[@TrevorJackman]

Could you try testing a mixed drive setup, SMR and PMR, and then test sustained writes and a rebuild. Sonology state that these drives should not be mixed but, if like me, you are stuck with some of these drives and what to expand your raid this will severely limit your options. While it is good that WD has finally released this information it is far too late for the people who have bought these drives in good faith and assumed that they could be treated as any other NAS drive.

[@hermask815]

Using something like a NAS in a home environment, I don’t have constant read/write cycles but I want security and longevity. I think the conventional recording seems more trustworthy.

[@leexgx]

What is surprising why has it taken a year for people to notice that the EFAX are SMR disks (as smr EFAX has been here from around July ish 2019 there are four s and other websites that have published news on this before) The cmr zone is about 100gb once that has been used up it tank to below 1-10MB/s, rebuild will go from maybe 1 day to 6-9 days after 30 minutes to 2 hours when rebuild has started (drives with no data on them don't count) assuming the hardware nas doesn't boot it first before it finishes (drobo really don't like them)

[@donh8833]

I have two WD60EFAX drives (Shingled) I did a ZFS RAID rebuild on a mostly full drive and it bombed. They dropped out. I tested both unraid and on synology unit. I contacted WD and they told me they would replace the drives with the same model. Needless I say I was disappointed WD would try this. I'm returning them to Amazon as defective. After going through the IBM Deskstar 1GB fiasco, I'm not going to let another company get away with it.

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[@leicaman]

So it seems the problem isn’t e use of DSMR but their lack of transparency. If they say they didn’t realize it would be a problem, then maybe there is a more fundamental problem.

[@MichaelAddlesee]

A major PR blunder by WD. I hope they learn from this and henceforth put all the relevant details on the spec sheets and minimise the marketing speak. BTW when you post videos can we have more hard data to back up the statements, otherwise it just becomes a bit of a verbal ramble.

[@dstarfire42]

I can't hear any background noise at all. Whatever hardware/software setup you're using for audio is doing a good job of filtering it out, so don't worry about it too much. Long as you're not having to raise your voice a bunch to talk over it, you're fine.

[@srsykes]

I can appreciate your position and trying to be fair to all sides. But for me seems like the bottom line is that if you followed what WD told us about the use cases; you will achieve the performance that you were expecting. I am certainly no expert in this; but it seems to me that a lot of other non-experts did not follow what WD told us, and by trying to save a dollar may not be getting the performance they need. They may not have dotted every "i" and crossed every "t" but there was sufficient information in what they gave us to get the performance you needed if you were willing to pay for it. In trying to save a buck, one may have out smarted oneself.

[@kalaglow5094]

Thanks for the update. Be interested in performance benchmarks. I've used WD Reds in NAS builds for Soho customers for years, hardly a failure. I just built a system based around the Qnap 251d mainly for storage, media streaming, ftp and a couple of virtual machines. Sadly purchased a couple of 6TB WD60EFAX setup as Raid 1 and am concerned about potential problems further down the line as one disk failed within a week. WD have lost me as a customer with this bit of dishonesty. It's not as if they are passing on the savings to the buyer. Rancid behaviour as they knew buyers would not knowingly buy an inferior product.

[@AndrewFremantle]

Unfortunately Seagate are no better - they've been smuggling undocumented SMR into their consumer-market drives for years now.

[@tikyichan6630]

For Hard disk, Durability > Capacity > Price > Read Write Speed. There is no point of reducing the durability to decrease the price like SSD. Unless the Durability of SMR hard disk can be improved like CMR hard disk, I will avoid buying SMR hard disk even the CMR hard disk is more expensive.

[@AndrewFremantle]

SMR drives are fine for durability. The problem is that certain workloads cause the drives to become brutally slow. And if that happens when they're part of an array, that can be bad news.

[@rchilla]

Thank you very much for your videos and work. I changed my order to "red pro"

[@Trooper_Ish]

I really liked WD. But the late admittance of the red Nas drives being SMR was a weak attempt to avoid the law suits that will come. If they did not market Reds as Nas drives, would be no harm. the Blues and Blacks are disappointing, but it just means less performance, rather than non-functioning.

[@antongoykhman]

Buy Seagate Exos X Series. They are CMR and a lot cheaper. Enterprise grade drives. Good for NAS, Desktop for gaming or whatever. Exos X16, Exos X14, Exos X12, Exos X10 are CMR Drives.

[@kian8382]

As much as I dislike their decisions to push SMR, I think they're doing what's necessary. QLC/PLC are killing the HDD market and so HDD manufactures are looking for a way to segment their future market, pushing NAS users to pay more for PMR drives and use SMR to battle cheap flash drives in the low end, and maybe there will be a market in the data centre for SMR too when SMR aware systems become widely available. For the rest of us, it's going to be an "HDD/PLC which is cheaper to buy" question for a while.

[@kalaglow5094]

Actually WD didn't reduce the price when silently switching from CMR to SMR for WD Red NAS drives.

[@bikerchrisukk]

Thank you very much this for update 👍

[@fabioguedes4872]

this is just chilling for WD... lack of transparency is a cardinal sin in the IT world and that shall not go unpunished... for now on WD products are banished from my house and from ANY company I build stuff for...

[@Si---]

I have 6TB WD Reds, model no. WD60EFRX, how can I tell if they are SMR?

[@SimbaSeven.]

*looks at the 1TB WD Black* WTH? That's the whole point of buying a WD BLACK drive is high performance!

[@A_z_z_y]

It is 2.5" drive

[@SimbaSeven.]

@@A_z_z_y So? I have older 1TB WD Blacks that are non-shingled and would wipe the floor with that drive. I bet my 2TB Samsungs would as well.

[@MiGujack3]

I'm glad I always use WD Golds.

[@Act1veSp1n]

nah, fuck that, they know what they did - they shipped a bad product to save money and didn't tell anybody. Seagate did the same. I have older Barracuda drives that are CMR, yet the new 8TB are SMR drives - horrible performance.

[@markwith140]

Seagate are just as bad, they don't specify if a drive is SMR or not on their spec sheets. WD should not be the only company taking the heat for this SMR issue. My reading on the topic suggests that SMR was developed to help increase capacity because drive manufacturers are hitting the limit of the capacity they can fit on a platter. If this is the case then I find it hard to understand why SMR would be used in smaller drives, unless drive manufacturers are reducing the number of platters to cut costs while maintaining capacity...pure speculation on my part... I personally prefer WD drives to Seagate, in my experience they are more reliable, I have had two Seagate drives go 'pop' on me in recent times.

[@kalaglow5094]

WD are the only hard drive manufacturer supplying SMR drives marketed as "Built for NAS Compatibility" (the WD Red NAS drives)

[@kewitt1]

I'm glad I went with 8 TB Seagate. I've always favored WD Drive. But I looked at Big DATA centre failed rate off all there drives. And the Seagate turned out to be better. My Synology currently has 4 TB Seagate partly because of your videos, partly because of the data I got from the big data centre failure rate. www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

[@leexgx]

8tb wd red is cmr (its the 2-6tb ones that are smr if it has EFAX in part number) EFRX is cmr

[@meskalino]

why not just buy Seagate IronWolf? all certified SMR-free

[@mechantl0up]

WD sponsors this channel? Sounds like so.

[@MikkoHamunen]

Less hand waving and more information. This proWD channel has misled too many people to buy WD instead of for example Toshiba.

[@Beterhans11]

smr killed my drobo! i'll never use it!

[@augurseer]

Interesting

[@alessandrozigliani2615]

WD RED MY ASS. THEY ARE WD BROWN.