WD Red Plus NAS Drives - The NAS SMR Issue Solution?

[@oliveraasht1588]

Your videos have been so helpful! Recently the WD Red drive in my Synology NAS crashed after 3 years due to bad sectors. I'm technical but this isn't my area of expertise. Your videos are so easy to understand and has helped me massively on making the decision on my next drive. Thanks a lot and please keep up the good work!

[@nascompares]

Cheers for the compliments Oliver. Appreciate the props!

[@runemllegaard1544]

I have decided to go with Seagate Ironwolf from now on. Just in case.

[@sitte24]

They should've created a new colour in their ecosystem for SMR drives used for archive. Now they are just destroying the whole "Red" trademark, they've been building up in the last couple of years. Red's were the go-to for NAS drives, nowadays you can't recommend them anymore

[@leexgx]

Yep wd Green is only what smr is suitable for

[@sitte24]

@@leexgx they should introduce a new colour for archive, if SMR is used in any other hard drive, it should be clearly labeled as such

[@doubadia]

I returned them and brought some Ironwolfs. No playing around.

[@Seritias]

This just seems like they're looking for a way to sell people the thing they had before at a premium, that's a super scummy business tactic

[@IdgaradLyracant]

worked for Coke.

[@nukedathlonman]

In the past, I was pretty loyal to WD given how long and well built their drives have been for me - this goes all the way back to the Caviar line up of the mid 90's. I've just never had much long term success with Seagates of any era. Most of the time Seagates have failed on just out side of warranty. Two eceptions to this: I have an old Seagate ST-277-R-1 from the early 90's that's still runs like a champ. The other exception is a pair of 500gb Barracuda's from the problematic 7200.10 line which are still running strong... This series of drives where prone to bricking them selves with the "bsy" bug... Further, these drive were in a D-Link DNS-323 server I used from 2008-2016 (24-7 use for 8 years, and still good to go today as temp USB drives). These days, when it comes to RAID arrays of any kind & NAS deployments... I simply can't and do not trust WD at all. I'll still occasionally reach for the Gold when enterprise grade drives are called for, but even then they are no longer my de-facto to go because I don't trust that they won't pull the same stunt again. So despite my lack of longer term successes with Seagate drives, Seagate must be pretty happy that they are my current choice....I just hope that doesn't "byte" me with higher failure rates I've experienced with Seagate drives in the past...

[@exgenica]

Re statement in video at (02:30) Probably already covered somewhere in here, but "Plus" also includes 4TB and 6TB drives. WD40EFZX and WD60EFZX

[@PolarRed]

This week I've had to send back 2 6TB Red drives bought from Amazon, not both bought at once, it took 3 deliveries, and my insisting the ignore what it says on the pack and look at the table on the drive itself, for the correct drive to turn up! The drive was clearly marked on the product page in several places as FRX (and specs shown matching that drive as wel,) but twice they sent an FAX, both times suspiciously carrying a sticky label on the bubble wrap as FRXs!!! I suspect from amazon's reaction that WD had been a little bit sneaky with them as well with regard to these drives. As for the "new" demarcation for the drives, to say I'm not impressed would be an understatement, no 4 or 6TB CMR? I'd have thought these are probably the most popular, especially with home and Soho NAS builds, so they're effectively pushing people up to the 8TB and the extra cost that entails, also add to that an almost certain price premium increase for having that plus stuck on the end, for something that was standard up until just a few months ago! Not to mention, that if Red drives are especially designed for NAS, what the heck are these SMR drives even doing dressed in Red in the first place? Seems like a classic case of shifting the goalposts to swerve the blame, and get a nice return on the margin whilst doing so. I call that bull%hit! When I get round to building another NAS I seriously doubt I'll be giving that couple of thousand euros for the drives to WD again!

[@jewelbriard5444]

Exactly, smr should not even be in the nas lineup.

[@TrevorJackman]

Unfortunatly I am still stuck with SMR drives in my NAS, I would like WD to go 1 step further and replace these drives for people who where duped into buying them in the first place. If I want to expand my raid in the future I am extremely limited by my choice of drive and my NAS will also be limited by the slowest part which will be the SMR drives. The rebranding to me is a clear sign that they deceived their customer base by not releasing this information from the beginning. The rebranding addresses their future sales but does nothing to fix the problems they have caused. Extremely disappointed with their handling of this issue.

[@DjRavix]

They actually I would suggest contacting WD with the issues of the drives I had 4 tb SMR wd red drives and these were replaced with 4 tb wd red pro drives without costing me any extra money

[@bloodrush545]

I agree, contact them and they will send you CMR drives. I did it and they gave me the Pro version on top of it.

[@leexgx]

Just RMA it they will replace it with a cmr drive (as long as you state its working poorly in raid)

[@AleksandarStankic]

Sound levels on your chanel(s) videos are to low. Please increse sound volume.

[@nadpro16]

No NAS drive should be SMR

[@bfvader]

I've had eight WD30EFRX drives in a NAS for the last 6 years thankfully without issue. I did send one back to WD early on for warranty after it started throwing SMART errors in the first few months and they replaced it with an EFAX drive. It doesn't seem to have had much of an impact on my system performance, but luckily I haven't had to rebuild or bulk load a lot of data since I first replaced it.

[@hermask815]

I’d like to compare this to backup tapes. DLT and LTO (linear) never mad a problem whereas technologies squeezing more data into a place like AIT and DAT (helical) were not that reliable. And consequently disappeared from the market.

[@ToomsDotDk]

got an SMR drive in my NAS before i know the issue with SMR, so right now i have 5x CMR 8TB + 1 SMR 8TB drives in an Raid6 in an synology nas. The SMR drive is always at 85-90% utilization and all the other CMR drives is around 25% util. it is rebuilding right now and it will take around 34-36 days to rebuild because of the SMR drive

[@rodfer5406]

Never buying WD again...

[@lukaszbien2904]

There's nothing iout there right now that would beat them. Bought recently HGSTs but that's WD as well...

[@PitboyHarmony1]

@@lukaszbien2904 - Dont agree, Seagate (and even Toshiba in some classes) matches them step by step.

[@sitte24]

WD Gold are fine, using some of them without issues

[@TheDanielShepherd]

@@sitte24 I can find WD Golds for less than WD Red Pro, any reason not to go for them you think?

[@sysghost]

The others are even worse on this. Besides WD's are the more reliable choice of all remaining brands on the market. Of thousands of drives going through a datacenter where I work, the WD's have the least amount of failures over time. Highest MTBF so far.

[@BruiserFL]

Tired of replacing my WD 4TB Red drives and I feel that WD is playing games with us consumers. Thanks for your review on these.

[@elfwyn8707]

In theory the Sollution is ok I think. In practice however the offerings - on Amazon for example - are all over the place. Product Photos with Plus and without Plus. Product Variants switching between Plus and non Plus when selecting a different Size. Now there is even a different "Micro-Variant" with the 100 and the 101 using differnt fillings presumeably with the lower Version having higher price. I'm not really sure which seller to trust. The WD Online Shop has only a fraction of the models available right now. I'm on the fence about trying Ironwolf instead, but I need a silent NAS.

I dont like it. They should not have SMR in the WD Red line period! I became aware of the issue a few months ago when I was hunting for two new drives for my filserver. I realized all brands, WD, Toshiba and Seagate had started to use SMR in there "consumer" drives, basically your average desktop budget drive. Then I also read that WD Red now had SMR on some models. I think the howl SMR thing overall stinks, I mean when it came out in 2013/2014 Seagate called there Drives Archive drives, and where up front with the pros and cons of SMR. No we are getting SMR in all budget drives and its not even in the datasheets and even worse, the prices are not going down so they are all pocketing the extra profit they make by reducing the number of platters and heads the drives need for the same capacity. No savings for the consumer, we are stuck with the short stick. Information like PMR/CMR and SMR is just as vital as RPM, Cache and size and should be in the data sheet and printed on the drive label for anyone to read when there picking a drive for an application. I have used WD as my Main drives going back over 20 years but in bulk like in NAS use I have had Blacks, Greens (modified firmware) and Reds. Now I only run some drives in raid, some are just archiving so SMR would be fine. But I still dont want to pay CMR prices for SMR and think I have CMR drives in my system. So I ended up going with Toshiba N300 drives, had on for 2.5 years so got another two. Cost less then WD equivalent PMR, fast as hell so I dont see why I should pay WD more for less, they can keep there drives. They went from my goto brand for hard drives to my blacklist of brands to not buy. Toshiba is my new goto brand, not that I approve of them or any HDD maker not writing out the use of SMR on any hard drive but at least there not trying to sell drives that dont work for there intended use case.

[@GabrielTerisPro]

still pretty confused... the WD Red plus in 2 to 6GB are in red color in the table, are they no good?

[@Morpheus-pt3wq]

You have to count in that Seagate bought WD last year. Increasing prices of WD branded stuff is possibly a result, that should force the customers to buy Seagate drives for lower price. This comes especially with NAS drives market, which was mostly ruled by WD Red drives. With releasing SMR Red for the same price old Red had and increasing the cost of CMR Red, WD is at disadvantage over Seagate´s Ironwolf drives. This came to my mind after i thought about how Seagate implemented SMR into their drives. First were the archive drives, then they implemented it into desktop Barracuda drives, forcing all users, who want old reliable tech, to buy more expensive HDD´s and now they practically removed their greatest competitor on the market from the competition. If this will go as they want, we can expect them to implement SMR into more drives and put all more reliable drives behind a paywall, forcing customers to pay more again. I mean, why they didn´t implement SMR into WD Blue lineup or some high-capacity archive drives and chose NAS lineup? They must have known it will go this way. I wanted to buy less noisy HDD for my setup, but as i don´t wanna support these practics, i´d go for more expensive SSD with less capacity and use some of my old HDD´s if needed.

[@OverwatchForever]

I email WD and asked if the drive was CMR or SMR and they said that no one at western digital knows this information. I call BS on this. SMR has no place near in NAS or RAID.

[@x3merx3mer]

I have WD Red and my DS220J works horribly slow, HDDs grinding all the time and the whole NAS is unusable while they grind ..but how do I know is it mostly because of the weak NAS or because of the bad drives?

[@SelectImage]

Adding complexity (3 ranges instead of 2) is a just face saving effort by management. In a way its immaterial as trust once lost is difficult to get back, for me its Iron wolf for now but will keep on eye out for the next corporate misstep.

[@majstealth]

thought they did the same shit in the consumer part - of which my main hdd is affected... nas is pre pmr/smr wd red´s but still, all in all shitty jobs were done here

[@pawnslinger1]

My 8tb red is very slow compared to 12tb and 14tb wd drives... not sure why.

[@allopatricape]

Inhave some 3tb and 4tb efrx drives from about 3-4 years ago. According to your table these should not exist... efrx should be CMR but the 2-6tb Red drives should be SMR. Which is it? So confused.

[@leexgx]

The smr disks should be called "wd red single" as using them in raid can result in unpredictable performance or flat out not work, but I guess wd had to change the cmr to wd plus so when a consumer buys a wd red (not plus or pro) they have to assume its smr unless they check the part number (unsure if they are going to actually put the word SMR on the disk liable it self, but smr shouldn't be used in a raid array even if they do manage to rebuild successfully but it's the time it takes putting data at risk is not acceptable)

[@alanwong928]

I have the 8TB drives of the old WD Red drives, what are they? SMR or CMR? They are labeled WD80EFAX

[@cleverchap]

Handy to know that the 4 x 3TB WD30EFRX I have in my current set up are WD Red Plus (CMR). Thank you for helping to clarify.

[@jewelbriard5444]

Sadly the popular 4TB will not be in cmr unless you go PRO , it was a nice go to size for price and space. 8TB would be alot more money. Like others, my new 2 DRIVE qnap nas with these 4tb smr reds will need something else when the time comes . And looking to get a new 251d or 253d ... and will not use reds. Watching and hoping for amazon prime day deals on ironwolf.

[@wihannieuwoudt8972]

My opinion is that SMR drives should ONLY be used as archive drives and certainly not NAS drives.

[@megansmith9855]

I'm annoyed with WD about this; there is a presumption that these drives are marketed for NAS devices, then they should be fit for that purpose. Last week one of my 4Tb WD Red drives failed in my NAS; it was an older RX Red drive. I was about to go to my computer dealer to buy a new drive the next day when at 1 am watching KZbin, I stumbled across the SMR issue with these WD AX drives. I was less than impressed. Synology didn't list the AX drive on its Hardware Compatability List, so now I've bought a replacement Seagate Ironwolf which sits along two older RX 4Tb WD Red drives in my NAS. Because of my disappointment with WD over this issue, I've now going to replace all my drives with Seagate and give WD the flick permanently.

[@lliu27]

Me too. just bought 2 Red off ebay and found they are AX, returned before I unbox, replaced with ironwolf straight away

[@iJordanDean]

Shameful marketing ploy to cover up their problem, SMR should not be in a NAS period and should not be marketed as such.

[@ZakZky007]

I'm appalled at this! I'm asking again because you have not replied the previous time I asked for your help. I just bought the Synology DS920+ Unit and I'm just having a bad experience... I have 2x WD40EFAX-68JH4N0 (4TB), 1x Seagate ST3000VN000 (3TB) and 1x Seagate ST1000DM003 (1TB) in SHR (Btrfs), it has been parity checking for the last 6 days! Transfer speeds are dismal 15MB/s at most, although I have a 2 LAN connection bonded. (2000 Mbps, Full duplex, MTU 4000). Can anyone help me get this thing running like it should? Windows 10 x64 with CAT5. SMB3 is active, and Windows set to SMB Direct. But I can't' know for sure till this parity check is over, now at 80%. Is it those drives that is bringing everything to halt? And can one return those drives for a swap out?

[@smstnitc]

I have a RAID5 of three 8TB SMR drives. I had eventually planned to extend it with a fourth drive, but the build time made me sad so that drive is just waiting as a spare when one of the other three dies. I always planned for that volume to be for daily backups only, so performance isn't an issue, but I won't do that again.

[@majstealth]

8tb rebuild, look forward to 9+ days..

[@smstnitc]

@@majstealth I accidentally pulled the wrong drive recently, and pulled one of those 8tb smr's... the rebuild only took less than 3 days... so adding a 4th drive I'm guessing will be 6 days or less.

[@majstealth]

@@smstnitc still, less than 3days should be more like 10h max - but that also depends on the controller and how powerfull it is

[@smstnitc]

@@majstealth you're not wrong, but writes to those drives are slow, so there it is

[@smstnitc]

@@majstealth figures, one of those drives died a few minutes ago... I think they didn't appreciate being talked bad about this morning 😄

[@TheLDunn1]

Isn’t it easier just to buy Seagate Ironwolf instead?

[@CRaschNET]

Honestly, the Red Plus labeling is a slap in the face. WD knew that SMR drives are not suitable for actual NAS duties. I hope the lawsuit wins and remove anyone from using SMR drives as NAS compatable.

[@judykonopka9029]

I have WD Red Plus in a dead Drobo. Can I put them in a Synology NAS directly (with data on them), or am I going to have to reformat them? (I'm probably thinking I have to reformat them, but would love to get your advice).

[@katrinabryce]

I think the SMRs should be a completely different colour, maybe WD Yellow, that competes with Seagate Archive. I follow channels like this one, so I know that if a drive in my 4 x 6TB WD Red ZFS pool fails, I need to replace it with a WD Red Plus (or an Iron Wolf), not a WD Red, but I suspect a lot of people won't be aware of this.

[@locacoyote]

Yea, sort of a loaded baby diaper yellow!

[@DanielleEmberley]

They have intellipark? Default setting?

[@kian8382]

To us DIY consumers who WD probably don't care about, the cost savings and capacity uplift with SMR drives aren't worth the performance penalty, while to WD or any manufacturer, 5 Dollars saving per unit times 10 million drives is 50 million Dollars more revenue, so until we the customers want to pay that much more to change their mind which is never, this is probably the best solution we are going to have for the time being.

[@paulz4632]

Good job your channel and a few others are calling out manufactures that ship crap stuff

[@steveatkinson2196]

This was forced by Synology and IXsystems (and others) de-listing WD Red drives from there supported list. They had no real choice. Just purchased a disk today, and it wasn't a WD. Guess the're hoping to clear out the channel of WD Red drives and start to rebuild. If you have an affected drive, contact wd support ask for a replacement. So far it seems to be successful, for what I hear.

[@jasonhowells7974]

What a farce this is by WD, in my Hard Drive Experience I've only ever bought 2 WD drives "One External and one USB", and both went the way of the dodo, even when you where backup drives, they should scrap this idea and say what they are on the front, as they have to put new stickers on the drive anyway. ROB loving the Synology series, as a CS407 owner I want to buy a new version this year I have been watching the Series but I have question can I put a couple of questions to you please, if so please let me know where to post it cheers.

[@rwdplz1]

Just pulled the 6TB I bought last year and it's one of the affected drives...

[@AktywnyTata]

If RED series is designed for NAS storage then why they keep WD RED SMR as RED series...? Keep it, sell it but don't pretend they are for NAS!!

[@IanNelson]

Is the wd80efzx CMR or SMR?

[@cyprus125]

So I found out i have 3 SMR drives in my RAID, I contacted WD and there replacing all 3 with CMR drives for me. (there all 6TB drives)

[@ADDICTIVESimon]

How did you make contact and arrange this?

[@chriscardwell3495]

Price difference?

[@rayh594]

They work fine until you have a drive failure and then during resilvering the shingled drives are so slow they get kicked out of the raid array. And then you're screwed. WD hid that they were using SMR and now they're trying to save face by pretending they can keep the tainted name. They are dead to me.

[@bloodrush545]

They should remove SMR from the line. It's just going to confuse people who are just getting into NAS. I contacted them and they replaced them with Pros. My next drives will be Seagates. This is absurd because the rebuilds were absolutely terrible, and swapping them out has been more difficult then I imagined.

[@-EC002-]

Always used WD Reds (RX), but think I'll be trying Seagates, in my new NAS. Seems pretty suss in my opinion. Way to kill your brand kudos! what were they even thinking?

[@exgenica]

I've now owned a number of WD40EFZX and WD60EFZX HDDs for over a year now, and have had no problems. They are also the quietest HDDs I have ever observed (and I've worked with thousands of HDDs). I can barely hear these Red Plus drives even with my ear right next to any of them. Contact vibration is almost non-existant, too. HOWEVER... Shipment Packaging and Early Failures: Nwegg packaging of "OEM" HDD offerings is not quite adequate at this time. All drives were packed in bubble-wrap, 1 HDD per small cardboard box. It would have been great packaging EXCEPT... *one side in EVERY box had an open edge of the bubble-wrap on one side of the HDD* The HDD could contact the cardboard box sides without any intervening "bubble" along that entire edge. That means on that on one axis the HDDs were NOT properly protected from shock during shipping. Drives also "bounced around" in boxes so that can also expose the drives to high-G shocks during shipping. If dropped on that exposed edge from any reasonable height, the induced shock will exceed the drive's G-shock spec. That could result in DOAs, early life failures, intermittent errors, or "weird noises" during operation. It's an easy fix on the shipping prep line and WD should take care of it ASAP. Negative Reviews and User Error?: By the way, I also think some number of negative reviews claiming DOA's, greatly reduced capacity, etc of these drives are due to *_user error_* when first installing and initializing these drives...with users being unfamiliar with GPT v MBR, and OS and hardware incompatibilities with the multi-terabyte drives. I've seen compatibility issues between these drives and quite a few docking stations, even when the docking stations claim compatibility.

[@sd906238]

Telling the truth by putting CMR or SMR is too confusing. Better to keep it a secret and drawing in the suckers then selling them a pile of shit. Just like a Venus fly trap does to a fly.

[@CaptainMoose81]

Anyone know if I should replace the WD Red SMR drive recently installed in an always on TiVo DVR?

[@wihannieuwoudt8972]

I certainly would have! ! !

[@Robert-ug5hx]

Seems like an unnecessary and confusing thing, the old reds worked just fine if you needed more performance tbe red pro

[@wihannieuwoudt8972]

I would now much rather buy seagate ironwolf

[@Quettesh]

Not good enough. People are so used to the Red branding being NAS drives, it will solve nothing. People will still get screwed, not immediately, but when something happens and they will need to rebuild their RAID which is too late to stick it to WDs arse. It is just a stunt for the class action lawsuits to show that they did something, but actually nothing. Thank god for Ironwolfs!

[@MyLeoOne]

Great! Now I know my 6 month old nas, built for reliable data backup of my family's devices, is obsolete and might break any day because some fuckhead thought it would be funny to make 3$ more on an HDD for nas storage. Reminds me of VW and Dieselgate

[@nickzwa]

yeh.. no. the solution is to get iornwolfs. there cheaper and all use CMR. Have had mine running 24/7 for years and not even one IO error. Seagate left WD in the wind years ago, thats why WD has had to cost cut by useing SMR. They dont care about your NAS. Seagate does. In respect to WD Red CMR drives. Ive had one crap out after 6 months. got a refurbished one as a replacement. I dont keep anything important on that as I expect it to crap out at any moment. From now on, I will only put seagate drives in my server.

[@greathelmm]

3 of my wd reds failed and just after the big shopping season to boot... going with iron wolfs this time

[@marcuslejona]

was in market to buy more WD RED and saw this... O MY GOD...this is what happen when you let marketing run a business

[@kuroiikaze7140]

your video make me thing "i'm deaf" for a few seconds because i was play some music on this laptop before watch this

[@OverwatchForever]

I think Western digital got class action sued over this.

[@jec_ecart]

They were confusing before and have made it worse. 😡

[@geckorinda9714]

its look like smr=mcas

[@darkshvein]

no no no we need McNeil...tests