Western Digital & Seagates Response to the Unlabeled SMR Drives & Stats From Backblaze

[@andrewkieran8942]

Here's the translation of WD's statement into English: "These drives are designed for NAS use. Some of them use a technology that makes them completely unsuitable for this, but we won't tell you which ones. Try them and if they don't work, just buy our more expensive drives that actually do work."

[@jagdtigger]

Pretty much, sad as it is what boiled my blood is ironwolfs cost the same amount af money as reds(minf you i only looked at it at my favorite shop).

[@mdd1963]

Sadly, that seems pretty damn accurate! Perhaps a relabeling change to NASBNR (NAS, But No RAID!)

[@vollhorst140]

mdd1963 WD should relabel these as the WD crap series, good for nothing.

[@fourbypete]

When you build an NAS check the website for tested drives and use those part numbers. Never trust a HDD website.

[@mdd1963]

@@fourbypete That might work *IF* the NAS manufacturers have gone and specifically removed /disavowed all the SMR -variant drives now being discussed...

[@GonePh1shing]

I really don't mind that the drive makers are using SMR. What I do mind is that they didn't disclose it, and especially WD for using it in drives advertised for NAS use. Considering the WD Reds are the same price as the equivalent Toshiba (N300) and Seagate (Ironwolf) drives, I think WD are going to lose a lot of business over this.

[@ultimatedjX]

The same here. What I can't get over with is the (IMO) how the most popular audience for that Red product line - content creators - is going to remain clueless regarding what they had bought. Lack of transparency is in this case a well deserved place on my personal wall of shame. I give them additional negative points for a "fuc& you" public answer to the problem. (Today I have notified 10+ content creators I'm in close relationship with about what just happened with their bellowed (really) WD Reds. Neither of them is going to buy from that vendor again, including myself -- two out of this group started building new NASes - great job WD! You'll surely not get any orders here). This is an ideal situation for Seagate to offer a special discounting program for people who'd like to get rid of their WD Reds.

[@ultimatedjX]

Egh, plus shame on me, because I have been recommending REds to everyone... It's amounted to tens of $$$ during the last couple of years in orders... IT shouldn't be that hard to figure out how I feel now.

[@sharedknowledge6640]

GonePh1shing Seagate was smart to issue their statement making it clear their Ironwolf drives, that compete directly with the Reds, do not use SMR. I agree this is going to hurt WD to the point they may abandon the Red series entirely and replace it with something that’s clearly not SMR. Toshiba.might be the biggest winner as they’re the least sleazy of the three.

[@berndeckenfels]

I would not understand "NAS" as raid-able but more like NL speed. Therefor I can see that SMD for NAS (bulk storage) is sold.

[@GGigabiteM]

You should mind they even make drives that use SMR. They basically replaced a known working technology with a shit technology that only has a single use case (infrequently accessed cold storage) and then turn around and charge you more for the older better technology (Red pro) when you actually want something functional. Both WD and Seagate are having an increasingly hard time competing with the SSD market and their solution for cost cutting was shafting the consumer.

[@StefanHolmes]

I like WD. They are my go-to brand for a drive I’d like to keep for a while and enjoy predictable performance. But. Someone at WD shipped SMR drives badged for NAS. Someone else signed off on that decision. Someone else knew it was a terrible idea and several others decided it was so bad they would have to lie about it if any customers specifically asked. They doubled down on those lies right up until the story broke. WD make good drives, but I will not buy another drive from them until they make me believe they are very, very sorry for what they have done.

[@wilman_studio]

Stefan Holmes ditto

[@proxykid567]

x3 they always been my go to, been using them since Maxtor times and experience has shown they've been better, until now. Hopefully they go back to be the premium company they used to be.

[@TeamNoLackin79]

Sounds like false advertising to me which can be a case for Class Action Lawsuit against these companies.

[@ZbigniewKos]

Where is the false advertising taking place actually ? It's rather lack of full information on the product features. Has WD stated these drives are not suitable for their purpose ? No. QNAP/Syno have ceritfied these drives for their NAS devices. Don't they work properly in these devices ? No.

[@sopota6469]

@@ZbigniewKos if it was a new product, sure. The problem here is that they made a substantial quality change in the same product line without telling anyone, and the only way to find the difference between generations is looking at some letters of the part number. If Intel were caught doing something like switching their i3 CPUs to Atoms the same way... maybe this will not stand in court, but their reputation has been destroyed.

[@ZbigniewKos]

@@sopota6469 Correct, it's not a generic product like a bottle of water that you're buying without looking at the part number. Part number has changed so 'you knew what you were buying'. If they changed specs without changing part number, that would be a different story. Intel was changing specs of products (between product generations) while maintaining the market product name but specs were always well documented there. The problem with WD is they are partly hiding specifications and changing what's not revealed to public knowledge but impacts performance of the product. They're not the first ones doing this, sadly. I agree, WD's reputation has been destroyed, at least in part. But rumours that latest WD Reds were SMR have been around for quite a long time. Seagate isn't informing customers whether given drive is SMR or CMR either. Too bad. Sadly, best place to find out is to look into Synology's compatibility guide, find drive part number's (assuming it is certified for at least some of their NASes), check product notes. If the drive is SMR, there's information about it in 'function' column.

[@clansome]

@@ZbigniewKos Don't forget Seagate response was essentially much the same as WD's. "Buy our more expensive drives if you want to avoid SMR."

[@ZbigniewKos]

@@clansome Seagate has been using SMR technology in their drives for a long time too. And they (sadly) do not clearly reveal which drives are SMR and which are not either. Not only in the Archive drives. Exos drives (at least some) have SMR too. I expect that Ironwolves (but maybe not Pro's) will sooner or later get SMR too. I'm guessing only the drives designed for continous writing/high I/O (like video/surveillance or low capacity 10K/15K SAS drives) will never get it. SMR is just not suitable there. For all other uses, when you're mostly reading and writing rarely SMR just works and allows higher capacity/lower cost so is inevitable.

[@ComandanteJ]

"These NAS drives are fine for a NAS as long as your NAS uses just one drive." Beautiful.

[@vanpeters9751]

Perfect for me because I'm going to hook it up to a USB adapter as one backup drive

[@adancalderon8915]

LOL, "put a sticker on it". Thats what WD did when it labeled it NAS. 🤣

[@Exploited89]

Exactly!

[@xandersnyder7214]

NAS with SMR

[@iflnr978]

Xander Snyder you post is not clear to me. Did they put fine print on the drive package or are suggesting that’s what they would do. I haven’t heard that there was any smr notification period

[@Exploited89]

shody ryon He’s joking 😁 no indication whatsoever on the box or the disks themselves...

[@joesworld396]

RIP WD RED. I can't trust them apparently.

[@judman13]

Can only trust Red Pro apparently!

[@GGigabiteM]

You can differentiate SMR from CMR drives by the cache. CMR drives have 64 MB, while SMR has 256 MB. More cache doesn't mean more performance, it's there as a crutch for the shitty SMR system, SMR requires a huge cache for its housekeeping functions for destructive writes.

[@An.Individual]

@@judman13 you can today but next week WD may change that without saying anything

[@unibrowser1]

The WD Easystores(shucked) 8TB-14TB share a R/N # with the HGST DC drives. For example the 14TB R/N number is US7SAP140 which if you google that you will find the data sheet for the Ultrastar DC HC530, which is a CMR helium filled drive.

[@HuMaNiTaRiAn1]

if you are shucking 8tb+ WD's you're still safe, it's only the 2-6tb ones that have SMR. I'm not sure how long that will last though, external drives seem to be the perfect candidate for SMR so maybe tomorrow you'll find they've been replaced. There's no easy way to differentiate CMR and SMR either.

[@jimpanse6556]

I shucked alot of MyBook 10 TB drives. They contain the WD100EZAZ which has R/N US7SAL100. Google points me to a pdf of the WD Ultrastar DC HC510 (old name HGST Ultrastar He10), which is a 7200 rpm model. CrystalDiskMark identifies the drive as 5400 rpm (like the WD RED). I trust the datasheet more, but who knows.

[@unibrowser1]

@@jimpanse6556 Yes I believe the reason for that is that these drives were binned, probably didn't pass QC at 7200rpm. So they firmware lock them at 5400 and slap them in external enclosures.

[@JJnATX]

just bought and shucked two weeks ago 12tb easystore. White label WDC_WD120EMFZ

[@unibrowser1]

@@JJnATX Nice! Just shucked another 14TB easystore 10 minutes ago. Rebuilding array as we speak 😀

[@Crackalacking_Z]

WD should be punished for their false advertising.

[@bobpatterson5935]

I have been in the IT business for 28 years and seen a lot of shady things come and go over time. About 10 years ago I saw a rather high number of USB drives fail from multiple vendors. A bit of investigative work led me to believe that hard drive manufacturers will pull drives from the assembly line that have less than optimal testing results and those drives end up in external enclosures. I am still waiting for the Class Action Law Suit to start up across the channel and get these manufacturers to come clean on their shady practices. We are assuming that they are calculating the run time of internal desktop drives over an expected lifetime vs the run time of the average USB attached hard drive and banking on their warranty process to scare people away from making a valid claim. Prove me wrong.

[@Anton-cv2ti]

I wouldn't be surprised if you are right, but external enclosures are treated much worse than harddrives in laptops or desktops. It is possible that a new generarion of drives were more susceptible to physical damage than the previous generation, and that meant a disproportionately large number of external enclosures were failing.

[@Starfireaw11]

@@Anton-cv2ti Yeah, but warranty doesn't cover physical damage.

[@wizdude]

@@Anton-cv2ti i support what bob is saying. i had a bunch of customers who had external drives just sitting on a desk connected up to a PC for use as external storage - the drives did not move. this was around 10 years ago and we saw a really bad failure rate - the drives would head crash and just click. the common element for us was the amount of head travel. those who were using the drive as a "backup unit" saw few issues. those who were using the drive as live storage, ie: as a production drive to work on office documents, had a much higher chance of losing the lot. i noted that about 1 year later the documentation and labeling changed for all of these external drives. they were now marketed as "backup drives" and at one stage the seagate units used to come with some sort of trial license/key for a service like carbonite. their recommendation is that you copy data from your PC to the external disk and then back it up again to an online cloud backup service. this made me very suspicious - why would the amount of head activity matter for a drive that was essentially a normal drive in an external casing. i suspected, like bob, that lower quality drives were being used. if a drive running in your pc starts to experience failure, it's really obvious, but if an external drive fails - hey - it just failed - like that's expected and ok. i also noted that around this time the warranty period offered dropped on some models from some manufacturers, obviously so they don't need to cover the warranty on the drives that died.

[@AllanSavolainen]

@@wizdude Technically you cannot sell harddisk as a backup device unless you know the enduser has some other backup method in use. As backups don't exists unless the data is copied to two different backup devices, preferrably in different physical locations :)

[@wizdude]

Allan Savolainen the documentation which shipped with the external drives clearly marked them as a “backup device” thus indicating that they were the secondary copy of existing data. Previously some manufacturers had used the word “archive drive” in their documentation. This naming and documentation change would have been specifically designed to prevent a lawsuit in the event of data loss or drive failure.

[@johnversluis3084]

I just cancel my order for WD red drives and order Seagate Iron wolf drives 2 days ago

[@cje7004]

if you can get the exos ones, here in canada the 16TB exos is cheaper than the IW 16TB

[@TonnyCassidy]

@@cje7004 Exos is an archive drive that uses smr

[@cavick]

So I don't understand why Seagate is being thrown under the bus on this one as well. The Ironwolf drives don't have SMR and those are the drives they advertise as NAS drives. So why are they getting hammered over SMR drives in channels not stated for NAS use?

[@gt362gamer]

I did a benchmark with a very old game, The Sims 1 with all its expansions, a game which base launched in 2000, with expansions up to 2003, by comparing save times in a lot where sims live between three drives: I couldn't see a clear difference between a Toshiba MQ01ABF050 (a 2013 HDD model) and a 960 EVO (a 2016 SSD Nvme model) through a m2 slot with pcie 2x2 interface/speed, being the last one way faster. Both had a time lapse of ~1.5 seconds to save the game (to be more precise, I looked after the time between clicking save the game while asking to exit the game and the moment the blue prompt window dissapears). Well, the most recent drive I got in the system, the Seagate ST4000DM400, a HDD which AFAIK uses SMR, needed about *twice the time* ... Which is odd, since the cache should do the trick. Maybe due to the game being that old it doesn't use it? Whatever, see this: Seagate Barracuda 4TB 2016 model: hdd.userbenchmark.com/Seagate-Barracuda-4TB-2016/Rating/3899 4K Mixed: Min - 0.6 Avg - 0.75 Max - 0.9 (MB/s) Seagate Barracuda 4TB 2017 model: hdd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/243570/ST4000DM004-2CV104 4K Mixed: Min - *0* (!!!) Avg - *0.3* (!!!) Max - 0.9 (MB/s) And this: www.reddit.com/r/Seagate/comments/htmcqt/in_the_userbenchmarkcom_benchmark_my_seagate/ ... I guess that's explains the complains from non-NAS users.

[@camberwellcarrot420]

This might help Toshiba and HGST to gain market share in the consumer and SMB spaces. I hope there are repercussions in terms of class action lawsuits for this fraud. WD pretty clearly pushes the Reds as RAID drives and they're not fit for purpose.

[@erisdiscordia5547]

Too bad that HGST is also just WD with different branding, because HGST was bought in 2012.

[@thefantasticmro3619]

CamberwellCarrot host is WD.

[@XavierVR]

The HGST brand was phased out by WD in 2018.

[@An.Individual]

apparently HGST was the source of these SMR drives when WD bought HGST a few years back

[@IMBlakeley]

@@erisdiscordia5547 I was saddened when I found that after several failures with WD red I bought HGST before they got discontinued. Still got an old WD red as a cold spare, I'll not be buying anymore that's for sure.

[@BR0KK85]

I always wonder why my country (Germany) or the EU isn't holding the manufacturers of ANYTHING RESPONSIBLE for some sort of Standard... Germany, the land of rules and regulations... What I impy is that we should have standards across specific hardware that must be adhered to or the simply can not sell it here period... Instead I hear crickets...

[@hussssshie]

You can only expect legal actions to be taken in the US, when it comes to really large companies like WD.... The problem is that they'll put up a jury with the same people who did let Mark Zuckerberg walk away unscratched for not understanding a single technical word of their own questions.

[@sethwilliamson]

1:20 Exactly! One of my frustrations is seeing WD Red and similar drives as standalone drives. I guess because some people associate them with bulk storage. There other differences that I'm sure I'll get called out on, but loosely speaking, a WD Red is a WD Black with the shorter timeouts. This provides a better user experience on a multidrive array since the controller can give up and look for the data elsewhere sooner. You DO NOT want this on a stand-alone drive. When you don't have the option to rebuild missing data from parity or find it on a mirror or something, it is better to let your drive try just a little longer before timing out. You don't want your single drive to give up early.

[@sharedknowledge6640]

Aren’t the black drives 7200 rpm while the reds are 5900 rpm? That certainly used to be the case. I think the blue is a closer cousin to the red drives. The red pro is 7200 rpm.

[@Jerryhze0129]

The failure rate from Backblaze is already annualized so no need to calculate from the run time. Great video!

[@bakcompat]

I bought 6 WD usb 8tb drives from my local BB about 2.5 years ago to upgrade my FreeNAS box, shucked all of them, and discovered each was a WD Red 8TB model WD80EFAX-68LHPN0 units made in Thailand. I got lucky on that one. They have a power on hour count of nearly 22,000 hours and have run fine for me across multiple versions of FreeNAS in a RAIDZ2 pool. I knew about SMR back then, but had no whiff of it being in the 8tb disks of the day, which were pretty much the top size, with helium filled disks having only been recently introduced. At any rate, they have served me well, have not had to RMA any of them, and due to shucking them from usb boxes, they each cost approximately $100 less than ordering an 8TB EFAX drive, which is what I was going to buy till I heard about them being in usb boxes. Seeing that WD has gone stupid on this topic means future disks I buy will likely not be WD. I would go with HGST, but wait... who owns them again? Oh yeah, WD bought HGST back in 2012. They are seemingly still semi-independent on Corporate oversight, but... can't bank on that one! Can't buy Seagate. They have sucked donkey balls for over a decade. Too bad Maxtor isn't around any more...

[@JohnSmith-iu8cj]

Any failed drives yet?

[@bakcompat]

@@JohnSmith-iu8cj No. Sitting at over 50,000 hours uptime on each of them with a raidz2 array that is about 75% full. And I even get periodic unscheduled reboots 6+ times annually. Mainly the limiting factor is it's an i5-2500k cpu on an older mobo with a limiting 16 gigs of ram. They really need to be put into a chassis with lots more ram for ZFS. Considering the percentage full, it's nearly time to look at building a newer larger unit. Perhaps next year.

[@jimpanse6556]

08:50 with chucked WD drives you just need to use a SATA power cable without the orange 3.3V line, if your pc got problems detecting the drive. The sata standard didn't use these anymore. The first 3 pins on the connector were 3.3V back in the day, now 1 and 2 are blank and 3 is used for a devsleep mode. So if there is voltage on pin 3, the drive goes into a deep sleep and isn't even recognized in the bios. Some people tape the pin off, but I just use power adapters or cut the orange cable completely, as deep sleep isn't needed in a 24/7 server anyway.

[@BSD2000]

Personally, I use Toshiba and Seagate Ironwolf drives for RAID arrays and the cheaper 'shucked' drives for mass media storage in drive pools (JBOD) using Stablebit Drivepool. All of my data is backed up on LTO5 tape using LTFS and external USB drives for redundancy - plus my 'core data' is also backed up using cloud storage. At any given time, I have about half a petabytes of storage in use and a few hundred terabytes in offline USB storage and tapes. I have stacks of drive laying around and in the last 10 years, I saw the most failures from Western Digital hard drives than anything else - about 7 drives, all out of warranty. I had one Seagate drive develop bad sectors and one 3.84TB SAS SSD fail - both replaced under warranty. None of the Toshiba's in my two server RAID 5's have failed. I also have six HGST drives and one of them failed recently with 60k POH. Some of the Seagates and Toshiba's have well over 80,000 POH and still show 100% health.

[@hermask815]

The invisible hand of the market smuggled smr drives on the shelves.

[@janispetke7233]

Underrated comment.

[@gt362gamer]

Is there any HDD company not using SMR for desktop new HDD drives nowadays?

[@NathanFernandes]

Went with ironwolf drives last year instead of WD Reds for my Nas... I’m glad

[@m.k.8158]

@J Fz I don't really believe that Seagate's poor rep is really deserved in modern times-they seemed to have issues many years ago. I've not seen one fail in years, however, I HAVE seen WD and Toshiba drives fail in the recent past. And Seagate's external drives are way more reliable than the WD external drives, at least in my experience.

[@fintux]

At around 6:35: The numbers are drive days. It's days, not hours, and it's not a "per drive" number. This is taken into account in the annualized failure rate, so you'll only need to look at that (and check that the sample size was large enough). The formula is: annual failure rate = failures / (drive days / 365) * 100% (where days is roughly amount of drives * 365 - but not exactly, as not all drives were in the use for the full year). As you can see, the drive days is a part of the percent figure.

[@this_time_imperfect]

After my experience with WD MyCloud devices I will never buy another Western Digital product ever again.

[@m.k.8158]

I swore off of ALL external HD's from WD YEARS AGO! They are very failure-prone.

[@ericapelz260]

This cements it for me. My home system will only get drives pulled from commercial use and have sufficient redundancy to handle a failure or two. At ebay prices I can buy plenty of HGST drives for redundancy.

[@seriphim8542]

Participating in recent HDD beta's for a couple companies I can say that this was one of the biggest questions we were all asking. Even before SMR's hit mass market we noticed some odd behaviors of the consumer and NAS beta drives. During those beta's the companies were very cagey on answering what type of technology was used in the drives even to the testers. As a tester knowing base level technology behind the drive helps, pardon the pun, drive our inputs. What it comes down to is SMR is cheaper to manufacture. For glacial or archival needs SMR is perfect. For live data not so much.

[@techpanda2022]

I unfortunately got a smr barricuda compute. They labeled the 190MB/s read and now I know why I couldn’t find the write speeds. Tested at 40MB/s. This is not usable for a pc hard drive period. Be transparent Seagate!!!!

[@josephjohnson6626]

Why no WD info?

[@elektrokinesis4150]

wd reds are really meant for jbod, not raid 5 or 6, in the products they include them in, they only ever ship them in raid 0 or 1 configuration. they are also heavily optimized for majority read workloads

[@livewiretechnicalservices8307]

Excellent coverage of this issue, Tom. Timely too! Had this issue with a batch of 4tb WD Red drives for a customer's Synology. C'mon WD! You're better than that. Seagate Ironwolf or HGST it is for me for now though. No interest in SMR.

[@lesleymunro4964]

WD bought HGST in 2012, in 2018 they started phasing out the brand too. SO just watch you don't get stung there too. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST

[@kjakobsen]

I don't necessarily think SMR should go away, as long as it is clearly labelled.

[@tin2001]

Agree. It has a place in the massive storage we all demand now, but should be limited to low demand use cases like desktop PCs and consumer grade external drives. And transfer rates listed in specs should take it into account, and list the speed when it starts moving crap around while you're still writing to it.

[@SirHackaL0t.]

Sounds not fit for purpose. I stopped using WD and Seagate because of low reliability and this isn’t helping either.

[@woox200sx]

What do you use now?

[@SirHackaL0t.]

@@woox200sx I used to buy hitachi or toshiba drives but haven't had to buy any for a couple of years.

[@tin2001]

Everyone gets runs of bad drives. If you're using Hitachi, you clearly don't remember the Death Stars. And Toshiba's used to be our most common DOA laptop drive brand where I used to work. I like to mirror everything important now.... With one WD and one Seagate to minimise the risk of both failing together.

[@saywhat9158]

Imagine if a car company like Toyota built a bunch of cheap lemons and then defended their actions by arguing that the dumb consumer should have purchased their expensive Lexus model instead if they wanted reliability. That is an insane defense and they definitely should be sued for selling a product not fit for marketed use!

[@Dazdigo]

I smell a class action lawsuit for these hardware companies since performance is guaranteed by various company. This also causes inconvenience and lost money for users since they will need to RMA these drives since they were flagged as faulty by RAID systems.

[@fredleggett923]

Is this one of the reasons why standalone, retail drives are so overpriced versus their external brethren? I've never read a good explanation of the absurd pricing difference, as it makes zero sense considering the added overhead of selling the enclosure and power cable along with the drive itself.

[@vgamesx1]

It's kinda like CPU binning where an i5 might cost $200 but the K edition will cost $50 more, but with a few actual hardware tweaks, they take the cheapest/poorly made drives into enclosures where they figure they'll only be used something like once a month whereas their blue or higher series is of a higher quality and depending on the use case NAS drives are designed to handle vibrations better while running year round and surveillance drives are designed to not fail as quickly writing data 24/7. Also, I should point out that an enclosure and a cable costs almost nothing, in quantiles of 1 it might cost you something like $8 + $1 on the low end but when you're buying them by 10,000 or so that number can be less than half, especially for things like cables, you could probably get a 1000 as cheap as $0.30 each.

[@tin2001]

The little SATA to USB adaptors are about $1US in bulk. The power supplies for 3.5" drives are about that too... And the plastic case probably costs less than the cardboard box they pack it all into for retail display. The disk itself is effectively waste product as far as the manufacturer is concerned, so being able to sell them for the price they do is great for them.

[@fredleggett923]

I was afraid this might be the case and the (much) lower-priced external drives were of a degraded binned quality over the retail ones. As someone who has had to resort to drive shucking because of the price difference, I guess I'm risking getting a trash drive that'll either die while still in the crib or wither away while still a toddler. Joy joy. I've done some research and it doesn't look like I've purchased any SMR drives, so there's at least that. I still can't get over the premium being charged for retail drives, though. Just utter insanity.

[@Diviance]

@@fredleggett923 They may not necessarily be lower quality drives. Since WD tends to change their firmware to support stuff needed for an external drive, they also slow down the RPMs to 5200 or whatever in the firmware. So they may just be using drives that didn't work right at 7200rpm in externals... so they would work fine at the slower RPM. Or they could be rebadging unsold drives that are perfectly fine. I do know that it is relatively common to get a good, rebadged HGST drive that is helium filled in them at the larger sizes. Good drives so far as I can tell.

[@jeffm2787]

I have 16 WD Red 6TB drives, always wondered why they were soo bad with FreeNAS. Needless to say they've been shelved now for a while.

[@vonkruel]

If your drives are EFRX they're supposed to be CMR. EFAX (newer) are SMR.

[@jonathanlanglois2742]

At 3:00, you say that the reason that they don't label them is that peoples wouldn't buy them if they knew, but I would argue that a lot of peoples out there who actually work in the field aren't aware of what SMR is. I feel that this more likely falls under the typical excuse of "we don't want to overwhelm the customer with too much information" which we've seen with so many products. The last time I went to the store because I wanted a cheap monitor, the boxes didn't even display basic information such as the refresh rate. While i do want to encourage local shops, I had no choice but to buy online so that I could make an educated purchase.

[@carlosgrijalva8104]

are the exos drives ok?

[@brettlovell4855]

I wish Unraid was open source. I know tom doesn't have a usecase for it, but IMO the "SMR" drives would be fine for normal Data drives, and then you can use the Pro drives for the parity drives. (for those unfamiliar, Unraid allows for up to 28 drives dedicated to Data, and 0,1 or 2 Dedicated Parity Drives)

[@phendryx]

Snapraid + unionfs/aufs is the same idea. SMR drives would be ok for data, parity drives would need to be of higher quality. Makes shucking for these types of solutions still viable.

[@leexgx]

Issue still stands wd as selling smr drives as nas drives when they are archive drives, nas work loads are totally unsuitable for smr disks (in a typical setup) 24 hours rebuild time cmr disks vs 8-10days on smr (higher chance of rebuild fail on smr as well due to lower data reliability of smr)

[@todayonthebench]

If a drive has SMR or not should likely be labeled on the drive itself, and be part of its product specifications. And I too suspect that external HDDs will soon be elusively using SMR. Though, frankly stated, if I made hard drives, I would have SMR as an optional feature that one can simply enable/disable on the drive. So that the end user can decide between high density storage, or good write speeds. (though, some users likely won't notice since one needs to fill the drive a fair bit before SMR's actual write speed impact starts taking effect.) Though, RAID software should also likely be SMR aware, yes, it will likely not make a huge performance difference, rebuilding will likely not be all that much faster. But for longer term storage arrays that doesn't see much traffic, then it can be a fairly cost effective solution. (One could move to a tape library at that point, but they have access times in the order or minutes/hours, unlike HDDs that can spin up in a few seconds.) And I guess Western Digital has given people a rather reasonable reason to not buy their drives....

[@rayjaymor8754]

I was *this* close to buying a stack of drives. Suddenly I've decided my old drives will do for a little longer...

[@davidg4512]

I hope they don't push SMR to usb drives. I love shucking drives.

[@thefantasticmro3619]

It’s hard to resist the 10TB and 12TB sales.

[@AndrewFremantle]

They absolutely will. Everything Seagate 4TB and up has been SMR for years. It allows them to build and sell equivalent capacity drives for cheaper than WD. And WD has taken the "Use SMR but don't tell anyone" straight out of Seagate's playbook.

[@BenThatOneGuy]

The WD reds in the Easystore chassis is SMR too now.

[@davidg4512]

@@BenThatOneGuy well not the ones 8 tb and up

[@ZbigniewKos]

Seagatte's 2,5inch 3, 4 and 5TB drives are all SMR. They're putting them into Portable Expansion/Backup devices.

[@ronch550]

I got an SMR drive sent to me by the seller 'by mistake' (??). I'm using it in a desktop PC for media storage. Should I return it or should I just suck it up?

[@SomeGuyInSandy]

These videos make me happy that I went with Seagate EXOS drives in my last FreeNAS. The previous one is running older WD Reds, so whew! One more thing to remember for the next build...

[@SilverDrake11]

I had bought a 2.5" 2TB seagate barracuda 6 months ago and I was getting write speeds under 1MB.. what was I doing with this? No raid array, just using at as an external drive. If you look at the 2.5" drives on sale that are more than 1TB, I haven't been able to find any that aren't SMR. The premium seagate iron ones, are only the big 3.5" drives. The wd 2.5" reds and blues are all SMR.. meanwhile I have a 2T from 5 years ago that works just fine, before all this SMR stuff.. Even toshiba's 2.5" are SMR

[@dabombinablemi6188]

The only reason to buy one of the reds over a blue at this point, is really the vibration protection. That's it. And at that point, might as well get a slightly higher RPM Ironwolf for around the same price. The standard Red drives really have no place at all.

[@lyfandeth]

Sold for NAS/RAID use, but not suitable for that use? Congrats, that's a violation of the Uniform Commercial Code and the Magnusson Moss Act in the USA. Slam dunk lawsuit.

[@mwjetton]

I thought it was common knowledge that non pro/gold WD drives should be avoided when setting up a raid array... Good to hear a detailed explanation as to why though!

[@sethwilliamson]

It'd be nice if the Backblaze report could corroborate MTBF. That's a good bit more data collection than just looking at how many of each model you swapped each year, but it'd be more meaningful. Eg. of the drives that failed in the past year, what was their actual-TBF vs claimed-TBF. It'd be eye-opening if one product averaged 82% of the published run time versus another that reached 115%.

[@alexandrecouture2462]

RIP Hard drives! I have made a NAS at home and 2 years later, I already had 3 HDD fail.Both Seagate and WD. For that price, I could have bought a good SSD.

[@Gartral]

the interesting thing about this entire debacle is that within a few years the entire argument may become moot as flash based solutions will surpass what magnetic platters can offer in capacity at similar price points. (flash has already handily crushed magnetic speed). this is just a symptom of these companies' excessive greed and attempting to remain relevant in a market that they are quickly aging out of.

[@user-xd3gk2tw3n]

Shitty part is I just bought 9 of the 4 terabytes hard drives last year, I want my money back

[@vgamesx1]

I mean as unlikely as it is you could explain the situation and ask the seller if they'd be willing to do anything or you can always put em on ebay as used.

[@anthonysbarrett]

Check the model numbers, i did the same thing but the store had still had the previous model pmr drive on the shelf.

[@tin2001]

We got a replacement drive for the server at work in like January.... Guess what we bought. Performs really bad at random times compared to the Ironwolf it's mirroring.... Though not as bad as the failing drive it replaced 😂

[@scrwbl8]

Over the last 20yrs I had all my IBM harddisks fail, who then sold their hdd division to Hitachi and the ones I cames across from them failed, who then sold their hdd division to Toshiba and I'm not going to use those. IMO the hgst drives are similar. Since IBM/Hitachi failed so miserably I have always used samsung/seagate untill ssd'd became mainstream and only a few of those failed. I totally get what you mentioned about the statistics, but this is just my personal/professional experience with these brands.

[@CH-vb5kr]

If an external stand alone drive uses SMR then I'm not too against them, but I'd hate to buy a WD Red, stick it in my NAS and find out it's SMR. (At present I have 4 HGST 8TBs, but I dread to think what I'm going to do if one of the fails.)

[@colorplane]

- Add support for SMR to ZFS - oh, no - Sneak silently - oh, yes

[@BillThrash]

So I have a PR4100, running in RAID5. I'm wondering what you suggest we do to either A. replace the drives with better non smr drives, B. how do we replace these if it has the ability to fail?

[@leexgx]

Should be using raid 6 if you replace them one at a time pull a smr disk and replace it with a cmr drive one at a time after rebuild (just hope there is no broken data stored on the smr drives to make the array fail)

[@lordgarth1]

I always use enterprise class drives for my NAS use at home. They aren’t that much more even for new as long as you don’t want the current largest size. I would think if you want to go cheap with those SMR WD drives you’d be better off using something like unRAID.

[@johnsmith9205]

Hey Lawrence Systems, 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)?

[@KillerXtreme]

So I just built a Home Nas using 5 of these 6tb WD SMR drives in RaidX2, should I be concerned?

[@simonmaduxx6777]

YES

[@cornjulio4033]

This sucks. On every project I start right now, I have the impression it's a very bad time to do so (market wise).

[@Diviance]

Sounds like buying WD's externals and shucking the drives is the better option since they are just rebadged HGST (I think it was) drives in them. No SMR (from WD, Seagate externals use SMR). At least, not yet anyway...

[@Ghennesph]

dang, I was going to buy some of those cheap 8TB drives for NAS use, but I guess if I do that, I need to manually manage data recovery rather than just migrating to raid5.

[@i81fish2]

How about the Seagate Shyhawk drives for surveillance? SMR? I would assume that they are not SMR drives.

[@i81fish2]

Skyhawk

[@ZbigniewKos]

@@i81fish2 They're not. Drives intented for continous writes (video/surveillance) just cannot be SMRs.

[@i81fish2]

@@ZbigniewKos Thank you

[@AllanSavolainen]

@@ZbigniewKos Video/surveillance drives are intented for continous (and non-random) low write speeds where SMR works just fine.

[@ZbigniewKos]

@@AllanSavolainen That's not exactly true. 'Slow' continous sequential writes can be handled by actually any HDD drive, even desktop ones, including SMR HDDs. Video/surveillance drives are designed to handle continous write workload generated by multiple video streams. So this in not anything that can be called slow. WD Purple drives for example can handle workload from 64 4K surveillance cameras recording in parallel, these are tens of non-stop MB/s per second. The difference between video/surveillance disks (versus rest of all other HDDs) is that, in order to avoid frame losses/drops during recording, they do not cause any interruptions during recording, even with maximum speed. These interruptions are typically generated by periodic thermal calibration of the heads. SMR disks would be absolutely inappriopriate here becuase, when their CMR cache fills periodically (which is inevitable during writes at maximum speed), writing speed drops (very) significantly. Even NAS or Enterprise drives are not suitable for surveillance/video use because they periodcally perform thermal calibration. It's a slowdown but not as big as with SMR. Yet sufficient to cause dropped frmaes in the recording.. As said, if you are recording just one stream, well below maximum drive's write speed, any drive can handle it. The more streams you are recording, the more crucial it becomes for a drive to keep sustained write pace to avoid frame losses, which other drive types (esp. SMR ones) other than video/surveillance do not guarantee. Effectively, video/surveillance disks can be used as general purpose drives or NAS drives but it'll be a bit pricey solution. The opposite statement is not true.

[@leonkessel9130]

my god ...im so happy that i chose seagate ironwolf drives for my synology one month ago... almost went for the WD reds because yeah.. its WD right... so from now on seagate all the way and wd never again

[@chaos.corner]

I'm glad this came out. I almost pulled the trigger on a couple of 4G reds a week sago.

[@martyhastings9347]

do you think its time to move to SSD's? for your daily backup NAS? i don't think the SSD's have the meantime failure rate for a "raid array" in a proprietary software server., do you? thanks for sharing.

[@vgamesx1]

Depends, are you a data hoarder or do something that requires a large amount of storage? Because if so you aren't going to find much beyond 4TB and pretty much anything past 2TB still isn't affordable and 512GB/1TB is roughly the bang for buck area for SSDs right now. So yeah, by comparison 3-8TB hard drives are still relatively cheap, that's double the space at a similar price.

[@martyhastings9347]

@@vgamesx1 you are right i was thinking my company (50 -60 users) for the backups . server HDD"s and NAS SSD's. (my boss will not buy into the "SSD's)

[@MarcoDiFresco]

Several months ago I bought a NAS and coincidentally went with Seagate IronWolf drivers; apparently I got lucky, right?!

[@kei2142]

I got 2 drives for a future build that's WD red!!!!!, and I got it past the return date. so I opened them up and found the model number to be EFRX, not EFAX, I got a CMR drive.... whew.

[@K0gashuk0]

Well I think this is where tiered storage is important. I am looking to build an old Dell R720 (R730 if I can find one) and utilize tiered storage. 1 TB of RAID 1 NVME as a read write tier. Followed by a SSD tier also in RAID 1. Finally, I was planning on having about 15TB of SMR 5TB drives in parody. However, I plan to only build out the SMR tier as capacity for things like photos and videos. Most data should go to the SSD tier until it cools.

[@davidj7823]

Looks like Ironwolf it is going forward for me. Shame really. The whole point of getting the NAS drives was for RAID and the sense of confidence in the event of a drive failure. I'll have to really weigh replacing the current drives in the near term.

[@skaltura]

It's sad how they try to hide this and how shitty SMR drives have become. The very first SMR drives were actually decent, from very first batches from Seagate, but they very quickly made them much much worse. Barracudas went silently to SMR, only change was that they dropped 7200rpm from the datasheet. I had a huge argument with our vendor over this, and had to turn to the hive as they refused to take in return of the drives, i believe i bought 24 or more of those. The vendor refused to accept proof etc. and because seagate did not explicitly say they are now 5400rpm SMR drives they refused to accept return, despite legally obligated to accept for 14days from delivery. A few posts here and there about this, and they quickly changed their minds and accepted the return. Glad they did, would have sucked to have close to 5000€ worth of useless drives.

[@gt362gamer]

Which drive/s had the 7200rpm thing dropped? I have bad memory, and I don't remember if, back when I bought a SMR 4TB Barracuda in 2018, I bought that 5400RPM drive without checking it of if I checked it somewhere and it stated 7200RPM, if that was the case, probably in a web. I actually think I wanted to buy it because I thought the amount of cache was a good sign of great perfomance for an HDD. Well... XD

[@sang3Eta]

I really hate SMR just be honest and put it on the drive label so we know what were buying! I bought a Seagate 4tb and 5tb had no idea the 5tb would be SMR and it's performance is awful. Had I known I would have bought another 4tb one!

[@timramich]

What about Seagate's Exos enterprise drives?

[@timramich]

@J Fz The 7e8 that I have are evidently CMR. Thank God.

[@PhilipBonev]

I made few raid arrays at work with Seagate Ironwolf. I was wondering Seagate Ironwolf vs WD Red. I guess I lucked out with my choice.

[@AllanSavolainen]

It is partly the fault of ZFS if it cannot handle SMR drives. I've tested several SMR drives with 'badblocks -swt random' which writes and reads the whole drive sequentally and this works fine and at about same speed as my older 2TB drives. The problem must be resilvering process that writes to the drive in random order, which shouldn't be needed, or should have a parameter you can use as there is no reason not to use ZFS with SMR drives as long as you use separate SLOG device (which is recommended anyways). Linux MD-device rebuilds drives with SMR just fine as the rebuild process happens in sequental order and also you can set the maximum rebuild speed in case you don't want to overwhelm the drive (which hasnt happened when I've rebuild raid5 MD-devices on SMR drives). And yes it is sad and bad behavior from vendors not to mark SMR drives and also there should be SMR flag that could be read with hdparm. But no filesystem not raid should fail on SMR as they are common and often bought in cases where you need high capasity but not superfast write speeds (eg 1Gbps NASes) And it is probably hardware raids that bork rebuilding these devices, but you shouldnt never ever use hardware raids in NAS. Either use MD-devices or ZFS.

[@ZbigniewKos]

I'm using Seagate's SMR ST5000LM000 (5TB 2,5 inch 5900rpm, shucked from Seagate Expansion Portable Drive 5TB)) in my Synology DS620slim with no issues. Syno had officialy certified Seagate's 2,5 inch 3/4/5TB 15mm-thick SMR drives for this model. They are rebuilding as expected, this is not not quick but given the capacity that needs to be rebulit (6x5TB in RAID6, 30TB RAW/20TB net) 3 days I got was reasonable (for example for 4x4TB 7200rpm Enterprise-class HGST CMR drives in RAID6 in DS418 it took around 24hrs to rebuild). Syno is clearly marking which drives certified by them for their NASes are SMR and which are CMR. They recommendation is just not to mix SMR and CMR drives in one RAID group. This NAS is of course used as cold storage - for media streaming/document/photo storage, not a 'heavy load' device. Small, silent and power-efficient. So overall I find nothing bad in SMR drives. The main problem is that manufacturers do not tell us which ones are SMR, which are CMR (they just say they are PMR which is truth but not the whole truth). I have been using Seagate's Backup 8TB USB drives (with their Archive-series SMR drives inside) for quite a long time with no issues. Again, it's for cold data, you wouldn't run database on it. Before I dedcied to use these ST5000LM000 5TB drives in DS620slim, I bought just one drive and started testing it in a PC. There are periodic slowdowns (when CMR cache fills up during constant writing) but this is nothing that should be causing NAS device to kick drive out of RAID set, of course assuming NAS device was designed properly and not to intentionally drop such SMR drives. Bigger problem for NAS devices is presence/lack of TLER (which has nothing to do with SMR). Clearly QNAP is promoting NAS-dedicated drives because they recommend no drives with TLER absent (i.e desktop ones). Synology has no issue with that, desktop drives (with TLER-purposely disabled, to bump up prices of TLER-enabled NAS-dedicated drives) frequently appear on Syno's compatibility lists. That's why I personaly prefer Syno over QNAP - they're just more elastic drive-wise and allow chepaer drives while QNAP (being somehow cheaper than Synology) is certainly promoting NAS-dedicated expensive drives. QNAP has not certified these Seagate 2,5inch SMR drives in any of their devices.

[@leexgx]

You have 2 problems with smr on rebuild they take extremely long time rebuild witch could put your array in jeopardy (over 8 days at least) And the smr disks have far lower data reliability far higher chance rebuild failure and total loss off the array The firmware bug with IDNF on WD red SMR (not very nas hdds) is probably what's causing nas hardware bays or zfs to boot wd reds from the array SMR should only be used in archive setups and no NAS maker should list them as compatible, if they do smr should be listed with a warning (Raid6/z2 is bearly enough as it is with currant disks thow smr into the mix, well its your choice with your data)

[@ZbigniewKos]

​@@leexgx No offence but you seem to repeat some SMR myths built upon early SMR drives and their tests/reviews. That's all true but only for these early SMR drives which had no or little CMR buffer cache. Seagate Archive drives are good example of these. Synology hasn't certified any of these Archive drives and QNAP put them on non-recommended list (both NAS vendors have differnet approach - Syno has just certified drive list, QNAP has recommended and non-recommended drive list, with grey area in-between). 'Modern' SMR drives have large CMR cache so data is written to CMR area first and housekeeping (copy from CMR to SMR area) is performed while drive is less loaded. Externally they do not present behavior typical for those early SMR drives or to much lesser extent. This is similar to comparing SSD TLC drives with and without SLC cache. Those without SLC cache will be slow, those with SLC cache will be periodically getting slow only under high, continous write load. FYI, SMR is present today (both with Seagate/WD) in many large capacity drives, especially those helium-filled. Synology has certified a lot of these high-capacity models for their NAS use, as said with a notice that these drives are SMR so shouldn't be used together with CMR in same RAID group. I haven't checked QNAP in this area but I can easily guess they have put these devices on their compatibility too. That means they have been thoroughly tested by both NAS vendors and good to use. The new WD Reds with SMR have been tested and approved by both NAS vendors too. So they're good to use. As said before, I tested rebuild times with these ST5000LM000's and they were proportional to the pool capacity versus my old setup with CMR drives - I got 3 days, not 8+ that some websites were getting in tests (but they were testing those old SMR drives). All this 'discovery' WD Red being SMR is a bit bloated topic. World has just discovered what everone in the storage business knew must have happened - technologies used in enterprise market sooner or later go down to consumer market. The fault in drive manufacturers is they don't tell the whole truth - they should be clearly stating which drives are SMR and which are CMR... And lack of this info in datasheets feeds discussions, plot theories and 'discoveries' like this one. Maybe now WD/Reagate will at least change their informational policy, hopefully... On the other hand some SSD drive manufacturers typically do the same - they usually do not tell us what type of solid memory is used. But, unlike with HDDs, it's easy to find out by opening the case and checking chip model.

[@gt362gamer]

@@ZbigniewKos I bought in 2018 a 4 TB Barracuda and last time I tested it in Userbenchmark it gave me a "0 MB/s" result in 4k mixed (which I guess is a round and not an actual zero, still bad result). In CrystalDiskInfo, the 4k write results are also very underwhelming when the HDD is reasonably filled. Those numbers seem to drop "fast", but at least they seem to stay there. Both this drive and the 2 TB and 3 TB Seagate counterparts seem to be that bad in 4k mixed in Userbenchmark as all of them seem to have also a "0 MB/s" min result in 4K mixed, while the drive you mentioned has a 0.2 MB minimum result. This may be stupid, but I saw how this drive needed usually about twice the time of a Toshiba 2013 drive connected by USB to save in a very old game, but maybe the cache is not kicking in, I dunno. In that case that means you depend highly on the cache to work in order to have a reasonable perfomance. And about rebuild times, check this out: kzbin.info/www/bejne/bpnHe4etlrmfbqs&t=613

[@joshhardin666]

So they should "spin" this situation with the truth: SMR drives are not appropriate for use in a NAS or other raid environment because ganging systems like RAID rely on low latency writes to do it's job. SMR is a fantastic way of getting your hands on high storage capacities at very low prices, and are great for archival or desktop use, but are not designed well for RAID storage or storage where you need to be able to write to the drive quickly. This would allow customers to choose the right drive for their application, advertise that they are not to be avoided for the appropriate workloads, and that they do offer non-smr drives (for slightly more money) that will suit raid or other high speed writing applications.

[@palles1972]

Hi i Want to buy nas hdd not Rady disk What to Bari.. ??

[@Zero1Zero1]

If they weren't already putting SMR drives in USB enclosures, you can bet they will be repurposing those NAS drives now

[@encinobalboa]

HGST (Hitachi) looks like the winner here.

[@steveurbach3093]

So! How many multi-bay NAS are not (used) RAID enabled? Seems like they are taking advantage of *Assume* (that these work in RAID configs on my NAS. Well they got me 😳 ).

[@alliejr]

WD has come clean with a list of drives with and without SMR. See this story: www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-lists-all-drives-slower-smr-techNOLOGY

[@AeiousKillhound]

I was kinda lucky, because I had a few of them ordered, thx to leak I was able to cancel it and buy another drives ...

[@tornadotj2059]

I already quit buying Seagate drives after losing a bunch of the Seagate ST3000DM001 drives. I was a WD fan, but I won't buy those anymore due to this shady labeling. I hope HGST doesn't go down this path too.

[@GianKrl069]

HGST is WD, they bought it on 2012.

[@tornadotj2059]

@@GianKrl069 Different labels though. Not the same drives. My WD Reds are 5200 RPM, my HGST Reds are 7800 RPM.

[@misium]

This is what is going to happen: smr will become a new standard for cheap drives. People will continue to buy cheap drives. Shucking drives will not die. The storage software will adapt to the new drives.

[@jack.h99]

Thanks for the video. I recently bought a 2TB hard drive for additional game storage and I thought I was going crazy when I saw how slow the read/write speed was. Definitely returning it for an SSD.

[@TheJesus205]

Which SKU model of WD?

[@williamdavidwallace3904]

One should not use SMR drives in a normal desktop or gaming system or workstation unless one has very specialized work loads of write once read many times. WD and Seagate indicate that SMR drives are low quality by the fact that the warantee period is only a yr or so, at least on drives that I checked. I used to have a rule to only buy drives with a 5 yr warranty or in some circumstances a 3 yr warantee and am adopting that rule again.. Last weekend a 6TB SMR drive in my gaming system failed. I replaced it with two drives that are none SMR 4TB and 2TB in size. Also have a drive on order 4TB none SMR to replace the other 6TB SMR drive in my system. (I only need 10TB of spinning brown plus a number of SSDs).

[@spacemanbowkonami]

I can empthize with the comment concerning equal counts and usecases and usages, but, having had over 30 years experience in both soho and datacenter hardware, I have seen far more Seagate drives than Western Digital even though I saw mostly WDC (from 120MB Caviars over green, blue, black, RE3 to 8TB WDEFRX). In HPE in my experience Seagate SAS OEM's generally fail after between 3 and 5 years, with certain generations failing more frequently, and if it starts, assuming OEM Seagate, expect more in subsequent weeks and months. Have seen this for 300 GB (exceptionally bad), 600GB less, but still had clusters, 900GB seems to be reasonably ok, and 1.2TB is exceptionally bad again. On desktop drives I have seen too many catastropically failing, where other brands have a tendency to degrade (sometimes quickly). Obviously over the years I have also seen boatloads of Maxtor and Quantum failing over the years, just as Samsung 2.5" which in many cases barely made it past 2 years. But none are mentionworthy in 2020. Granted, some Seagates were not applied for their intended use, a DM drive is not meant for a NAS. But neither was a WD Green and I saw far fewer issues there. Coming back to the stats from Backblaze: the 12TB drives are reasonably new and the stats confirm that, on average there are less than 365 drive days. That means that within one year there is a failure rate that exceeds 3%. Regardless of numbers that is for me a clear warning to steer clear of these drives. And what concerns WD Red: WDC dropped the ball with the SMR on 2 to 6 TB range. They dropped the ball a second time by failing to clearly mention that only the more recent WDx0EFAX models are SMR. The older WDx0EFRX drives are still CMR. At he same time it makes it even more infuriating as casually and silently they have introduced an inferior and potentially data threatening model under a previously praised moniker. Thanks for this heads up, I will only consider WD Red Pro for storages purposes from now on.

[@ronch550]

If they didn't think it's so bad they wouldn't be so quiet about it.

[@gokhanersumer2273]

Why this reminds me Quantum Bigfoot drives ?

[@simonmaduxx6777]

Question to the commenters: What kind of drive is a WD Elements 8TB? It is one of the most unimpressive drives I've ever used, mainly because it tends to take 10-15 seconds to rev up, even is the computer is already on. thx in advance.

[@simonmaduxx6777]

@Led Zeppelin da hell does this mean????

[@Diviance]

The Elements external drives are rebadged drives. There are several different HDD models inside... it might be an amazing HGST helium filled drive or it might be a not so great rebadged WD drive of some sort. Only way to be sure is to open it, I think? Can't remember if you can get the proper model number of the HDD from software before opening it, check the drive shucking stuff on reddit to be sure.

[@McCuneWindandSolar]

I have both Ironwolf and barracuda in my nas.

[@Amit-sp4qm]

I just read your comment too fast 😁

[@zesta77]

Add another reason to not use Western Digital in addition to them moving to only selling 512e Advanced Format drives now that pretty much all systems support 4Kn without difficulty. Completely ridiculous. They happily sold 4Kn drives before when few systems supported them. Makes no sense at all.

[@leexgx]

A lot of nas don't like 4kn drives (drobo definitely is incompatible with 4kn and smr drives)

[@zeroibis]

Reality, people can and will not buy that which they can not afford. They are already massively overpricing drives which is why people are shucking them. Common forms of raid such as 5 and 6 simply do not work with very large drives due to rebuild times and risk of additional drive failure. Now with the uncertainty around SMR drives this issue is further increased. Thus you see the rise of raid 10 configurations. However, I would wager that really this is the fall of more traditional raid. While a traditional raid will completely fail with drives like this other software based solutions such as drive pool with mirroring do not. So I believe that we will see a rise in demand for such solutions that simply bypass the issue completely.

[@freddobrowski2974]

THEY NEED TO NOT PUT THAT CRAP OUT IN THE FIRST PLACE

[@satin227]

it's class action time. WD lied your NAS died

[@alessandrozigliani2615]

If ironwolf drives are actually cmr, I am not buying wd for at least ten years now. I fortunately have wd4000efrx drives (64 mb cache) which are all cmr. MAN I always have spare drives around for months and I would have discovered they do not work in the nas when rebuilding the array. This is so far worse than Seagate's st3000dm000 disaster... First they have to fix documentation and labels. Then fix marketing. Then maybe. But maybe not. I hope they bleed market share like crazy.

[@johnmadsen37]

I got a WD elements. Was going to put it into nas. I only buy hgst hdd or Samsung ssd. Thought I’d save a few bucks. Lol. Of 4, 1 was dead. It u I s just funny. I will not be using the others in the nas. I kept them as externals back up (24tb). After doing the math, used SAS server drives will last years longer than anything new on the sata consumer side. Plus I went to hardware raid 6 and it is notably faster, and with LSI tools to manage caching, shrink/expand, and expand ports to external chassis (8-16 bay cases). Software raid is free , but it is literally inferior. And for a few dollars on eBay for used high end cards, geeez. Why didn’t I do this sooner. Because I just outgrew my 24 Tb of space last month.

[@logicawe]

Thanks for the info 👍

[@JHACbiz]

NAS...Not Actually Suitable

[@arakwar]

They traded losing sales for losing customers. I always bouht WD drives up until now. Trust is lost. Fuck them.