Why We Need SMR Listed in Hard Drive Specs

[@MoraFermi]

The most infuriating part of that submarining of SMR into RED line is that they pushed it onto older models that never had this option before, so replacing failed drives in older RAID arrays is dangerous.

[@TechyBen]

Yeah, I wonder if people would be defending the customers if they "submarined" slightly lower denomination notes into the payments to WD. ;)

[@Mr_Meowingtons]

I have 4 3tb WD reds from back in 2013 i got 4 more for a RAID 6 i wonder if they switched to SMR during the run because all 4 new WD Reds i got in 2019 would not play nice with my LSI RAID card ERRORS ALL OVER!!!! I had to return all 4 drives.. so SMR was a complete FAIL! and wasted my Fing time... i will tell you 100% SMR messed up my raid setup!

[@samiraperi467]

@@TechyBen Homeopathic money!

[@duncanyoung9705]

@James Smith The SMR WD reds do have a different model number, but this isn't obvious, unless you're trying to figure out why your new drive doesn't seem to work correctly :-)

[@WorBlux]

@@Mr_Meowingtons No, but they may have switch to exposing 4k sectors, which could have confused the hardware card. (may have been fixable via a firmware update)

[@TheBackyardChemist]

This is why I ALWAYS, I mean ALWAYS specify the exact model number on a procurement request for a part that could potentially have multiple variants. The new SMR drives have a different model number. But yeah WD was an utter scumbag for sneaking SMR into the Red series. Also the 1TB 2.5" Black has SMR, seriously, WTF? And to top it off, someone asked one of the manufacturers about a specific drive, at first they replied that they did not know and need to escalate (LOL, the amount of corporate BS), and then after they "escalated the issue" they had the gall to tell the guy that they will not disclose anything about the recording technology of a given drive model. I am not sure if this was WD or not, but whoever it was, they can shove an SMR drive where the sun doesnt shine. And I mean a 3,5" model.

[@TechyBen]

Nah, often first line need to escalate, as marketing/corporate also lie to them. Sometimes a few of the first line are clever enough (read between the lines)/pay attention to specs, but often it's hidden to them too. I remember working for a massive company, bottom of the rung, and thinking one week "this product is really strange, why would we ever produce this thing, it's crazy" 12 months later turns out business was in deep trouble, and illegally hid their finances from the government and the crazy product was a quick cash grab to stop them going under!

[@Olivia-W]

I have the last 1TB CMR model. Dodged a bullet.

[@andrewlonero8003]

You described me and my issues exactly here. I bought two WD Red drives last year because I thought they were the best and most reliable drives to use in a RAID1 to protect my most important data. I couldn't afford anything above two 2TB drives. My RAID array kept failing and re-building until the drives died and I lost tons of important data going back 20+ years! I was so mad because I thought i'd made all the right decisions. Thankfully, I was able to recover most of my lost data, but I had to pay a lot to do so. Until I found your videos here, I thought I was the only one dealing with this!

[@rajilsaraswat9763]

Patrick, thanks for bringing in the perspective of countries outside the US.

[@davidg4512]

Well. I can say that non disclosing on purpose because you know it's not going to sell = lying.

[@TechyBen]

No, it's totally to help the customers. /sarcasm

[@drd105]

Inspector: "Nevertheless, I must warn you that in future you should delete the words 'crunchy frog', and replace them with the legend 'crunchy raw unboned real dead frog', if you want to avoid prosecution." Proprietor: "Our sales would plummet!"

[@AinzOoalG0wn]

i'll go further and say potential class action lawsuit. because isn't that marketing deception? also bait and switch tactic? At least had they stated in their marketing and product page the switch from #efrx to #efax was from CMR to SMR, that would have at least been something. for laymens intended to using it for NAS, it would probably been better for them not to market these smr for "NAS" either imho. If lack of SMR in product page and marketing wasn't bad enough already, they didn't want to disclose this even upon further inquiry to customer support...... What reason is there for that if not trying to cover up their deception? The youtube video explained the situation very well. But i disagree with the premise that these oligopolies can self regulate. how did that work out for dram *rolls eyes www.forbes.com/sites/davealtavilla/2018/04/27/class-action-suit-alleges-samsung-micron-and-hynix-colluded-on-dram-supply-causing-price-inflation/#3603001717ce A slap on the wrist or a lecture isn't going to do much. You need to hit them with class action law suit and heavy fines, it's the only thing they understand..... isn't that why we have consumer protection laws in the first place? "A business fails to tell you relevant information regarding your product or service misleads you in any way." "The laws under MGL 93A prohibits activities that relate to overpricing to a consumer and use of "Bait and Switch" techniques. A court will award the plaintiff the damages if they can prove the (1) defendant knowingly and intentionally violated the MGL 93A agreement or (2) the defendant would not "grant relief in bad faith" knowing that the actions violated the MGL 93A agreement.[21] Additionally, failure to disclose refund/ return policy, warranties and critical information about the product/service are all in violation of the legislation, and can result in triple damages and lawyer fees." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_protection#United_States en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission#Deception_practices For now i will be sticking to Seagate Ironwolf non pro 4-6tb. Because what other choice do we have with these oligopolies? Yes i know even Seagate did this smr bait and switch crap for some of their other drives, but at least they didn't do it for their ironwolf NAS drives (yet).

[@7rich79]

It really is about communication and trust. Many NAS customers might only have a fault tolerance of 1 drive in their setup, so knowing which particular model is a suitable replacement for a failed one is crucial. When WD first released some information about which drives had SMR technology they only indicated capacity, not SKUs. Not knowing the SKUs or which year they switched to SMR made it impossible for me to evaluate if I had SMR or CMR drives.

[@happygimp0]

RAID 5 is bad for HDDs. When you use 4 drives @ 2TB each, you need to read 6 TB when a drives fail and you need to rebuild it. The change of getting a uncorrectable read error in a sector is about 30%. With RAID 6 you don't have this problem, the change that the same sector fails on 2 drives at the same time is very low.

[@duncanyoung9705]

@@happygimp0 I agree about extra redundancy, but you should be doing regular scrubbing on your arrays (and you would therefore notice uncorrectable read errors at that time (and replace the faulty disk)). So I woud say %30 is a little high.

[@tss20148]

In the WD case the issue goes beyond not labeling the drives as CMR or SMR. By labeling the SMR drives as Red NAS drives they are purposely marketing them for a use they are not suited for. Their response is even worse because it tries to gas light people into believing that the issue is people purchasing drives for purposes they weren't intended for while at the same time marketing them for just such purposes.

[@BR0KK85]

This should be a legal reqirement like with what's in our food.... This borders on fraud!? At least there should be a label for those drives What about unraid and such OSs? Can someone use those drives as parity drives?

[@CoriolanBataille]

Br0kk I just purchased five 4Tb Red drive two month ago ... they are used in ZFS pool and it’s a nightmare, the drive behave terribly, lots of writing and reading errors in the pools. Even worst sometime my VMs that are using virtual drive from the pool completely freeze for 10+ sec ... it’s a tragedy ... now waiting to receive new drive ... and I have to find someone to buy back those drives ...

[@chrismoore9997]

No, it IS fraud. Not on the border of it. It moved in and setup camp.

[@gtwannabe2]

It's absolutely fraud. WD slapped Red labels on their Blue drives so they could charge a premium. They invented the "Red Pro" CMR-only line for business customers because they knew SMR was completely unsuitable for RAID arrays and would result in a high failure/return rate.

[@Stars-Mine]

SMR on blue, Yea perfectly fine, I approve of it being used like that SMR on black or unlabled Reds... hellllll to the no. why would you ever do that.

[@AllanSavolainen]

Why not in Red, they are just vibration optimized drives, not performance drives like Blacks?

[@Stars-Mine]

@@AllanSavolainen the video stated why, and NAS drives can be used in all sorts of ways. Rebuilding can crash and burn with SMR if the software does not know its SMR. You get weird performance if the NAS isnt being used in a write few, read many situation. Sometimes people use NAS arrays as a workspace if they do things like video editing, so performance gets hit in unpredictable ways.

[@AllanSavolainen]

@@Stars-Mine Sure, but majority of NAS are sold with gigabit ethernet and 2 drive bays, maybe 4 bays if you get fancy. And those aren't performance critical and rebuilding RAID1 works fine on SMR. And isn't video editing write few and read many situation? Even the writes are sequential I think, usually you read from many source videos, apply effects etc and output compressed single video file? Still, the drives should be marked, but the issue isn't as bad. Professionals who need performance get SAS drives and/or SSDs if they need performant NAS devices. And one should never use (outside enterprise servers) hardware RAID controllers. Either use software RAID like Linux MD device (beware of the RAID write hole) or ZFS if possible.

[@NightMind0]

@@AllanSavolainen AFAIK many RAID software/controllers simply error out on long delays (which are common when rebuilding more RAID 5 on SMR drives for example), and even if they don't, the rebuilding process takes AGES - well beyond that of a CMR drive.

[@Dretje]

I agree, they should have disclosed which drives are SMR. Their statement that consumers should have bought RED PRO drives only holds true if we had known wat we bought. Now we cannot make an informed decision WD!

[@VTOLfreak]

If manufacturers just list the type of platters used just like the type of NAND used in SSD's, this is not a problem. But I need to know what I'm buying up front. If there's a big enough price difference, I might actually go for SMR and design my storage solution around it.

[@madalinradion]

There isn't a price difference,not only did the manufacturers not disclose which drives are smr,the smr drives are actually just as expensive as the cmr if not even more so,not only are they inferior, in my country smr drives are more expensive than the cmr drives,all this smells of a giant fraud to me

[@VanillaLibrarian]

@@madalinradion Added to that, SMR drives are cheaper to manufacture too.

[@Trig0r]

WD Red's have been my goto drive for a while now, where to go next...

[@Trig0r]

@Zpětná odezva Ended up buying a WD Elements 8Tb to shuck, has a WD80EDAZ drive in it, bit warm in its caddy tbh, not sure if its going back or not yet, little info on these drives..

[@madant7777]

It should be mentioned that, incidentally, the capacities of those SMR WD Red drives are what most users buy.

[@nicholaswjamrock]

I was planning on building a NAS box for my home, from march but it was delayed, this was something i never considered. Thanks for the info

[@chaos.corner]

Same here. Had the drives in my cart and everything. 2x4TB reds.

[@alexutv]

I like the thought of government regulation as what WD and the other are doing right now amounts to false marketing/selling snake oil.

[@Eideen]

I agree, I think all tech products need regulation for minimum marketing, like how long will you support this device with new updates, or how much current can't this USB cable handle before the phone starts to reduced charging speed.

[@voluntarism335]

it's better to have competitors to punish companies like western digital buy ironwolf nas drives instead of wd reds "nas" drive smr is unacceptable, smr should not be advertised as nas drives that is fraud imo

[@drd105]

this explains why it takes me 10 minutes to shut down a vm after it's been up for a day. they do fast burst writes, but slow bulk writes (because the cache is saturated). switching to an ssd changes this shutdown time from 10 mins to a few seconds. it used to take about a minute when i used older hard drives.

[@lordstevewilson1331]

Phew, i missed the bullet there, since i been using seagate nas drives exclusively.

[@abbie1971yt]

consider here in italy. I pay on the distribution channel for an 4T ERFX drive about 110 Euros. This price is stable (excluding change fluctuations) for at least two years, so well before inception of smr tech on wd red line. Sum to this the general unavailabity of the drives. I own a small data center and last december i ordered a 12-bay NAS with 4TEFRX. I waited about 1 month to get the drive from a WD multinational (euro-level) primary distributor. I got the RED and not hte RED PRO because i don't need the speed (7200RPM vs. 5400RPM) because i intend to use that nas primarly for backup storage in the DC, and used the $$$ fo fill the nas bays (12 drives) instead of buying only 8. Moreover i really wished to expand my backup policies by buying more space, BUT the situaion here is that going up in the drive capacity DOES NOT SCALE ECONOMICALLY. if i need X euro per GB using 4TB drives, i more than proportionally need Y euro to buy more large drives, so contrarly to the normal wisdom that says tha the more you go up the more the cost per GB goes down, actually, if we think of the drives alone, the cost per GB on drives more than 4T acutally goes way up. I tried to factor in the actual drive bays used, energy savings, datacenter space to reach a comprehensive TCO per GB, but the TCO go UP with more capacity drives. So no, I am forced to remain on the slow EFRX drives because all other options for me have an higher price tag. To sum up: I cannot afford (and even if i could, i cannot justify) to pay more than double for double capacity. Actually for what i see the ratio capacity versus cost is about 2 in capacity to 2,7 in cost. No. WD, no, this is not good. ALL On the lower end red drives. Don't say anything about higher end drives where the factor go up more rapidly. that said, all other comments you did apply. and to not disclose the technology and basically saing in the posts something like is simply INSANE and a breach of TRUST with the vendor as you said very well in the video.

[@martincerveny2284]

Yeah, I tried to calculate TCO for my home file server drives back in 2017. I'm changing drives right after warranty void as these drives can be still sold for a few Euros, so I picked WD Gold 10TB instead of WD Red 10TB. And the TCO? 60TB of drives cost me 470 Eur per year (WD Gold) instead of 875 Eur per year (WD Red).

[@hector5851]

This drives me mad.

[@thomasbonse]

spinning mad

[@jamerican347]

Talk about a head scratcher.

[@Manuzoka1996]

@@thomasbonse Spinning mad was very good 🤣 I'm spinning laughing at this

[@andrewyu7403]

I can tell you with confidence SMR drives have super slow write speed and must not use in RAID arrays. They can fail during rebulid

[@leexgx]

Just not sure why wd thought they could get away with it (well technically they did get away with it for over a year) I could understand it on the blue line of hdds or external hdds, but in a NAS hdd smr is very unsuitable

[@UrosVelickovic]

What about small businesses in the IT that live from setup of the systems for other small businesses? This makes us look bad and incompetent!

[@FamousAnon]

Thank you for bringing up the income disparity of the rest of the world. My 2TB HDD recently just crashed only after 3.5 years of usage, one that comes with my stock Dell XPS 8910. This has never happened before in my 20 years of usage of PCs, all of my previous HDD lasts way longer than 5 years, easily 7 to 10 years and possibly longer. All of the pictures of my newborn and my personal documents are all gone. It is only later I found out that the failed drive is a SMR drive and all of my previous drives are CMR. I'm from Malaysia, and you are completely spot on when you mentioned the importance of 2TB to 6TB drives. Over here, even 2TB may be a small luxury, so some of us even go for only 1TB option. Remember, Malaysia is not a low income country, it's considered one of the higher middle income countries and even then, not all of us can necessarily afford large capacity drives. Some can, but the masses can't. Had I know about SMR earlier, I would have just either opted for a more expensive CMR drive or reduce my capacity for an equivalent priced CMR.

[@szgege32]

I have the same problem as you, last time I lost all my data it took days to get them. I use more external drives + NAS to keep my data. I had 2 died WD drives in 4 years now... Both of them were in mid range,not the cheapest ones..

A few days ago I made a video about this topic and my conclusion was that companies won't change their policies and they will get away with it. In fact, why would they if SSD manufacturers still sell Dram-less drives without a clear indication of what they are?

[@RN1441]

A small but important difference is that those dramless SSDs are not marketed directly to a specific use case that their lack of DRAM makes them fail at. In contrast SMR drives marketed as NAS drives will fail in most (all except 'mirroring' or JBOD) NAS use cases. Dramless SSDs are annoying but don't shred user data, while a failed rebuild due to SMR drives will.

@@RN1441 I know, WD really fucked it up, but I still find using SMR in "consumer grade" disks is a ripoff, specially in performance drives.

[@d3xbot]

I've been trying to follow this situation since I heard the first rumblings of it. I came here to get a clear, concise rundown of a professional take on this situation and that's exactly what I got! Thanks for helping techies like me stay in-the-loop :)

[@nagi603]

It's bait and switch. Especially for those items that had non-SMR versions before. Loss of performance / features / etc in most countries invites (or should) at least some regulatory investigation, if done at a big enough scale, and you can't really go to a bigger scale than this.

[@HiggsField1337]

Thanks for calling them out on this. I hope more news sites do the same.

[@FredrikLiljeblad]

Well said. Thank you for putting light on the issue.

[@skaltura]

this is not that recent, it's been happening for more than a year now. Glad to see finally this brought to attention and getting a stop

[@scottxiong5844]

Thank you STH. I appreciate this video so much. As thoughts of beginning a SOHO business, recently having to learn about all of this just makes me feel discouraged. It's a little sad and upsetting that WD would do this to budget drives that SOHO businesses may only be able to purchase. Having learnt about the market that they are trying to squeeze out profit is not even a big portion of their overall market which just seems really confusing in my opinion. Inconclusion, I agree with you totally that this is not even hurting the big purchasers in the industry, it is only affecting the SOHO businesses.

[@NilsJakobson]

So the older RED drives still would be CMR drives? How do you find out by part number or serial if your drive is SMR or CMR?

[@ServeTheHomeVideo]

Hi Nils, we just covered this after a new update by WD. Here are the list and positioning in a table: www.servethehome.com/wd-red-plus-launched-with-cmr/

[@Eideen]

Great video Patrick. Will you do a article about the WD red "value" SMR drives, where you look at the WD RED SMR drives in raid? I think people choose disk between 2-6 TB because they currently don't need anymore, not because they can't afforded 8 TB or higher.

[@thomasbonse]

at the time i was building out my array, jumping up to the 8tb option was about 3x the price of the 4tb option, combined with doing raid-6, that would've meant spending about $1000 more to build out the array at a time when my budget was already very tight and one of my drives in the old array was dying and the others weren't far behind

[@WarrenLeggatt]

Yep, I just got a WD Blue for an old box that I built up for SQL Server and Git server. I only got a 2TB drive because that was all I needed for this build, anything more was pointless. I have just found out my WB Blue is SMR. No info on the product of the change. Pure BS move from WD around this

[@michnick8]

This is the video I was looking for, thanks a lot!

[@FranciscoMNeto]

This is your first video that I watch and I already love you.

[@kian8382]

Well said. I love that we have technologies like SMR for those who need it, I understand why new technologies need to be pushed to gain popularity, but for a few dollars savings per drive they're poisoning the industry and I think by doing this, they are building new segmentations of the storage market since individuals are moving to SSDs anyway, they probably just don't care.

[@joeferreti9442]

Corporations should be punished when they're shady or intransparent with their products!

[@moomin3430]

great video and great coverage of an important issue. I will be sharing this video a lot, as it tells the story of why and is a great information piece. More videos like this would be great, a video about current events and important news, something you only normally get as an editorial piece on a tech news site. Thanks and keep creating great content :)

[@WilliamJasonSherwood]

It's not even a matter of affordability, it's the issue of a lack of disclosure. Some people want the cheapest $/Gb others want the performance. Many people won't care if they are SMR or not, but those who will and those who want to know should be told.

[@tempritus]

I can't find this article from Toshiba anywhere. The link is broken on their own website.

[@lcarliner]

It’s seems that SMR drives should be used ONLY as an archival backup mirroring for SSD active drives!

[@AshenTechDotCom]

raid can be done with smr drives, it requires software or hardware updates, but, i have seen a few setups personally that actually dont write to the raid as the primary write, but to a high speed 10-15k rpm drives in raid, then, shifting the data to the storage raid, the software when rebuilding, has to be aware of SMR and that its going to have longer pauses and waits during rebuild. honestly, what i would like to see them do, is move to multi head stacks, i have tested drives in the past that used a single platter with its own heads, as the primary write platter, and another stack that starts to shift data to platters that are almost entirely written in SMR just having a small data section for rebuild/recovery use, the only down side was honestly that the test units we got to test were 5.25" drives. i suggested they do a different method if they use a 5.25 bay, use laptop/vrap size hardware, and just use a controller that can run the hardware with enough capacity and perf that, it may actually interest the market, as i pointed out, many geeks i know would be glad to buy a 5.25 bay drive if the perf+capacity are competitive, i also pointed out they could just use their own controller with 2.5" drives and a custom controller to combine them and manage buffer vs smr storage i suggested they look into using a setup thats in effect a mini-nas, you can mount in a system and connect with sata or sas. i also suggested something i know both server and home users would buy if done by a major company, that they use drives in a heavy SMR mode but, in a raid5 type setup, with an NVME ssd or 2 also being installed as massive cache, like i pointed out to somebody i know at WD, if their company made an external that used an M.2 (nvme or msata), or just sata ssd, as a cache on their external usb-c drives, they could sell drives that offer very very good perf, without a huge boost to cost, since they could use their own hardware just come up with a usb-c controller that can do that(their raid enclosures show they shouldnt have to work too hard to come up with, in effect, a hybrid drive, thats actually 2 in 2 enclosure.. as i pointed out, the main thing i have seen fail on SSHD/hybrid drives is the ssd cache totally taking a shit.. and..well... its also never a big enough cache to make the kind of difference most people would ask for... imho the smr thing, it should be easily identified not the games they keep playing, every company is doing this now... note: i still prefer HGST branded drives... goharddrive sell them refurb for excellent prices... 3-5 year warranty.. lowest fail rate of any company/brand every time i check fail rates for hdd's.. i know WD own them, but.. well.. lower fail rates are better...seagate really havent impressed me since they dropped to 1 year warranty and...i had to rma 3/4 of the drives i got from them during that time, ithin the first year, but the rest...within a few years...failed... wd, toshiba and hgst drives from the era... much lower fail rates... (i had 3 1tb drives of 4, that had head crashes within the first year of my own drives but, used seagate almost exclusivly back then and... well... customers/clients...all ended up quite unhappy with seagate... i got bitched out more then a few times by people upset it was taking so long for seagate to return replacements...then they get their full raid array replaced at once just to be sure, with a note on the RMA about needing matching drives, only to get back 4x1tb drives...from 4 different product lines... all refurb.. 2 that chucked bad sectors on a full format... 2 more rma's later they upgraded him to 2tb drives that did match, and had been pre-tested and formatted fully with zero smart errors... even after that.. within the year 1 had fully failed and one was failed by SMART due to havign too many bad sectors... anyway..yeah... not really a huge fan of having so few storage makers honestly... but... unless somebody comes out with a cheap high capacity, high reliability replacement for current HDD tech... we will be stuck with less then ideal solutions. imho, we are going to see more hybrid arrays, with ssd cache, feeding into large arrays of drives, often SMR drives im sure. i am told that people are working on linux os and software raid fixes that identify smr drives and handle them accordingly, understanding they will have times they have to pause and shift data to SMR sectors. what i think may be more ideal, is actually looking at the SSHD/Hybrid drive idea again, but, rather then 8gb cache, make 64-128g on top of a large 256-512m cache, for the mech section, making it so that a 64g cache drive actually has 128g of flash, wear leveled so that the ssd portion should never fail, with how cheap you can get small ssd's now, i have used a few on friends systems with primocache as L2 read/write cache for their raid arrays, used an old 240g with provision tweaked to leave 200g formatted capacity, on an array a friend has of 8x2tb wd black drives, that hes got in some form of raid with up to 2 drives failing at once, with no data loss, hes now got it mirrored to a mirrored raid of a couple shucked wd 8tb drives.

[@ServeTheHomeVideo]

You are going to find our next video on the WD SMR drives fascinating

[@gordonalcindor1405]

To me this issue is a simple one....their lack of disclosure denies me my right of choice and that could have detrimental consequences to my data. Imagine you are alergic to shelfish, walking into a restaurant that did not disclose that some of their key ingredients include shelfish.... We consumers are not foolish and would like to be given the opportunity to choose. If the pice of a 2TB SMR drive is say $70 and a CMR is say $85 I may very well choose to pay the extra for the CMR as I know what the consequences are in my specific use case which may be high random data write use. On the other hand if I just need a drive for say my weekly data backup I may choose SMR....but give me the choice!

[@miscbits6399]

"Imagine you are alergic to shelfish, walking into a restaurant that did not disclose that some of their key ingredients include shelfish...." Imagine you're allergic to shellfish, tell the restaurant and they STILL include shellfish. In such cases the staff have been convicted of attempted murder. If a customer specifies non-SMR to the supplier and the manufacturer submarines SMR into the chain, the product liabilities are horrendous

[@graemevetterlein]

I got caught up in this. Bought a 4TB WD red in UK. Managed to get it returned and refunded (direct purchase from WD) replaced with a Seagate Ironwolf 4TB. Very similar characteristics, slightly cooler & slower (My preference, don't use NAS for pure speed)

[@chrismoore9997]

I would spend more for a CMR drive if I had the option. I don't like that they are being sneaky about it. I don't like the performance hit that SMR provides. I had got a couple SMR drives because they were not telling the difference in the spec and had to send them back because they significantly dropped the performance of my ZFS pool.

[@johnathanwee6334]

Such a well thought out and informed video. Completely agree with your thoughts.

[@stephen1r2]

Can you buy small scale HM-SMR NAS units? or is this only for data silos?

[@Sva010]

data loss at ntfs boot drive on smr HDD when sudden power off

[@NofaKingway]

I thought your video was fantastic, you really touch on some great points regarding manufactures and users positions. What really knocked it out of the park though, was when you touched on availability and pricing models outside of the US. This makes it especially hard for consumers and retailers here in my country. We're wealthy and modern country by anyone's standards but as an export driven country our dollar is kept low against the US making imports expensive, especially in the current climate I expect things like electronics to really push up in price. Not only that but we have a high cost of living here which also pushes up the price a bit. At the time of writing the FOREX rate means 1 USD buys 1.65 NZD, not bad if you're an American buying NZ commodities! But if I go the other way it can sting. As a comparison at the time of writing a 4TB WD Red drive costs $154 USD whereas the same drive can be found in the US for $120 USD. This price difference will only increase as these prices will be based on previous pricing locked in before COVID, as economic forces shift that price will too based on the next price hedging negotiations.

[@ServeTheHomeVideo]

Thanks Kenny! I was actually in Auckland three months ago and had a blast on a very short trip (~60 hours.) I certainly saw the exchange rates there first-hand. When I got to NZ customs they were perplexed why I would go on such a long flight for such a short trip. The reality is that the flights/ hotels were so inexpensive it was the price of 30 quick lunches in the Silicon Valley so I felt compelled to see Hobbiton!

[@thekthe12345]

Just bought two external 5TB WD drives - Elements and Passport. Each of them is super slow after I've copied 4,5TB of data. I didn't know what's going on until today when I've found that this crap called SMR replaced old good drives. Well done WD, well done...

[@video99couk]

Just received a new ST8000DM004 yesterday, and there's another problem. It's marked ""HDD sold as a component of OEM solution and not for resale. the product warranty does not cover HDD if removed from OEM solution." This despite still being in sealed packaging. The warranty then is with the reseller and not Seagate. This is a fishy arrangement. Fortunately the fact it uses SMR is not a problem for me, it will only ever be used for large file dumps and not as part of a RAID, so it's a good use match for this drive type.

[@ronch550]

Are these SMR drives fine for desktop use where it's just the media drive?

[@chrism556]

Well stated and simple and direct message on SMR drives both for consumers and manufacturers.

[@Shdw-zu9ee]

What drives in the 2-4 TB range do you recommend for a zfs box now ?

[@leorickg]

When the table came out. I immediately checked my drives. Thankfully, none if my REd drives are SMR. Even the new one. So yeah. WD should have stayed with CMR with the RED drives at least. It maybe okay with the BLUE but not on RED, Purple or BLACK.

[@Pegaroo_]

Yep that's my view too SMR is probably fine for CCTV uses but to use it in WD Black branded as "Performance" your taking the piss.

[@madalinradion]

The thing is that the manufacturers arent passing any of the the cost saving that come from using smr platters back to the consumers,so they managed to cut the cost of manufacturing down for themselves,but they're aren't lowering the drives price at all,in my country the smr drives are more expensive than the cmr ones,so we're paying more for an inferior product,what is this bullshit ? I personally think they should not put smr even in the blue drives,most consumers buy blues for their pc's without looking or thinking what they're buying,putting it in the blues would rely on the consumers ignorance to increase their margins by selling an inferior product that could cause problems down the line to people that down know better. I've studied this tech for a few days and i can say that the downsides of smr are to great to be used even on the average's user pcs,they are good for storing a lot of things that you dont plan of modifying or deleting or replacing for long periods of times and thats about it ,I've seen test of just copying a 15 gb movie to one of these drives and the performance would fall in the 10-20 mb's range if not less if you tried to push the drive even more,nas users are reporting 5-10 seconds of drive freezing and drooping from raid arrays when they tried to add a smr drive to their arrays,so far the more I look into smr,the more I realize that it cant be used for all that much.

[@alessandrozigliani2615]

@@madalinradion wd blue have always been absolute crap. Especially 2.5". But you know it and that's it. Having a black behaving like that... man... i would be pissed.

[@Olivia-W]

Heh. I dodged a bullet on the 1TB 2.5" Black ones. I have the last model before they switched.

[@Olivia-W]

@@alessandrozigliani2615 I'd be pissed if I got SMR on Black. Apparently some Blacks are SMRs...

[@iamarya2k21]

Great job on this video! And yes purchase power changes all the dynamics of a products reach.

[@v1m30]

This is a problem for at least some 5 years now, SMR drives all over the place and no one knows which ones use SMR or it takes some damn time digging to find out. Why not make it clear? No one wants SMR but HDD markers want easier way to make higher capacities so even 4TB drives may have SMR and you gotta select the correct model to not get one with SMR, or you order one model but get a single number different one which does have SMR because seller sucks at differentiating the specific differences down to the precise model code.

[@terrymontague7946]

This is an extremely good presentation on a subject that needs more exposure. I could not agree more with your sentiments or your recommendation. I'm constantly recommending hardware purchases to SME's and WD HD's will not be going onto any of my specifications or recommendations. Like you I need to be able to trust the manufacturers I recommend and I never recommend those I cannot trust. Someone needs to remind the Exec's at WD, Seagate and Toshiba that honesty really is the best policy.

[@charray]

Some people have smaller use cases and they still want benefits of having more spindles in the RAID arrays. They don’t necessary pay less than the one who buy fewer but larger drives.

[@wishusknight3009]

For a single data storage device in my computer, used for say music and movies, are the SMR drives less reliable? or just lower inconsistant performance? If it is just the latter I think I am ok with that if it meant I get cheaper drive. Problem is drives have not changed much in price for literally years.

[@tootalldan5702]

Now to determine the drive info from those Dell and HP server array cards. You know, old ones that we previously bought drives for. Luckily, I had a few WD black drives for them.

[@miscbits6399]

These drives are sold into consumer markets and that means WD, WG and Toshib walk directly into the jaws of CONSUMER protection laws. What's at issue is the principle of equivalence: a manufacturer can substitute something of EQUAL quality for an established product. What they can't do is substitute something that is "almost" the same, or which will break badly when the product is used in ways the old device was fine with. A drive that works fine for 10 minutes of writes then turns to custard fails that test miserably and if the drivemakers are giving any trouble of kickback on this then the first port of call for most people culd be small claims filings - the reason being that it's cheap and quick to file, hearings are quick and you WILL get all your filing fees back when you win and lawyers are banned from small claims courts.

[@nioktefe8205]

The biggest problem is that there's absolutely no logic to their lineup, if you want a 4TB cmr drive you should go for a wd blue and not a red ? I don't expect anyone (at least consumer) to look up at specs sheets when buying hard drive (and they wouldn't even find their answer there), so why are they destroying their RAID designated lineup by mixing tech into it ? They destroyed all of their arguments in favor of "choosing the right disk for the right use" themselves, so all in all, keep shucking since you take as much risk going this route than trusting their marketing

[@TheEternalDreamers]

This is super helpful. Thank you

[@kienhwengtai8113]

I wonder if all the portable USB external spinning drives these days are now SMR because most can't tell the difference in that market.

[@andibiront2316]

I was waiting on your input on this subject. :)

[@MH-uc7zt]

If WD maintains the SMR Drives are not intended for Raid applications then why are the marketed as NAS drives?

[@JimFeig]

SMR even on desktop is going to fragment as the disk fills on consumer systems and it will start to feel like that system is frozen. We live in the age of young KZbinr and kids will fill up the family computer.

[@Ganyosa]

Tried do defrag an smr drive. Worst experience ever afterwards, download speeds were capped to kbps

[@intuitivme]

very educative and I appreciate the last art. Good job on this video. Decided to subscribe :-)

[@t3g3lst3n]

I wonder if my backups on my wd red are usable....

[@t3g3lst3n]

It was acting really shady on filling it 6 months ago.

[@Stoney_Eagle]

I have a Dell PE R610 with 6 WD RED 4TB (non pro) drives in ZFS2, do I have to worry about my data being safe on the long run? Its running super solid for 3 years now (can't say that from my "consumer" NAS I had before) I needed a bit more power and someone told me to get THIS combo but now I'm a bit concerned about the reds in ZFS2.

[@alessandrozigliani2615]

I don't know what zfs2 is (raidz2 maybe) but if their model number ends with efrx they are ok. Cache 64mb. Efax are the affected part numbers with 256 mb cache...

[@Mr_Meowingtons]

I have 4 3tb WD reds from back in 2013 i got 4 more for a RAID 6 i wonder if they switched to SMR during the run because all 4 new WD Reds i got in 2019 would not play nice with my LSI RAID card ERRORS ALL OVER!!!! I had to return all 4 drives.. so SMR was a complete FAIL! and wasted my Fing time... So the RED drives that are made for NAS and RAID setup are not supposed to be use in NAS and RAID setups???

[@sheldonirving9529]

I have a 16TB raid array messed up due to SMR drives (WD RED) … checksum errors during verify.... cant mount reFS.. shows up as raw.

[@steveatkinson2196]

Total agree with the disclosure is the big thing. Anyone in the UK you may have a claim against WD is you purchased a Red drive with SMR, under the sales of goods act, as the drive isn't fit for the purpose it was sold. I'm just glad I'm removing 4TB Red from my NAS already. Sadly I've left to Uk so can't use the sales of goods act.

[@mareksaltberg1484]

WD Red: EFRX = PMR, EFAX = SMR

[@deth3021]

You seem to be ignoring the fact that people use lower capacity drives to reduce rebuild time and as such reduce the risk of failure. So it's not just about their price. Also not everyone needs that much storage. So it's not about having the opertunity or the means, it's about picking the right drive for your setup. E.g. I know people who bought we red as opposed to the pro because they wanted the lower spindle speed.

[@RN1441]

Western Digital as a brand is now dead to me for the foreseeable future. I have exclusively purchased and recommended WD drives since the mid 2000s when the rash of dying seagate drives made WD the obvious choice for reliability. In the past year I have set up three NAS at home and work all using WD Reds, and while I have based on their current disclosures dodged this bullet, I just don't trust them anymore. Who knows, in the coming months we may learn that 'SOME' 8TB and 10TB models are also affected, or that this also impacts a 'small number' of black or gold drives. They have lied by omission and sold a product which is totally unsuitable to normal NAS usage as a NAS product, putting their customers at risk of data loss during failed rebuilds. At this point all we can do is spread the word and leave appropriate product reviews to warn the unaware until WD stops selling dangerously misleading products.

[@rockyhighwayroad7365]

Dude, they were not even listed on the Spec sheet or even the FREAKING MANUAL FOR The hard drive. SMR might be expected in Archive drives but not on the RAID focus Red Drive or seagate Barracuda drives. . This is criminal.

[@TrueThanny]

Well, by trying to squeeze a tiny bit more profit out of WD Red sales, I'd say WD has probably utterly tanked those sales entirely now. Nobody in their right mind is going to buy WD Red for a NAS now, unless they haven't heard of this issue.

[@07Review]

Wow.... now I'm freak out... i got my nas to save my family's memories, i just got my Synology and to start 2 4tb Pro thinking that the "word Pro" was for better product, but now I am scared. I don't want to lose my memories of my family. Is there any recommendation, I did start with 2 hdd to start, planning to add ssd in the future when price drops. I have the Synology 1019+, but now What should I do? Any recommendation?

[@ServeTheHomeVideo]

If you have WD Red Pro drives they are CMR and perform well.

[@07Review]

@@ServeTheHomeVideo uhhhhhh... ok thanks brother 👍, after this video I am going to get a 1 or 2 external hdd or sdd to have every 2 or 3 months a copy for back up of those nas hdd just in case, I got it basically just to used a a cloud backup for the family pictures, music etc. Thanks budy. GOD bless you!!!

[@gdrriley420]

Just add an extra character in the model name and standardized across a company have the drive type encoded. CMR, CMR with helium, SMR, ect. The amount of CMR on SMR disk would be really nice to know. I’m now weary to recommend any WD red drives.

[@rodfer5406]

Excellent editorial.****

[@Jamesaepp]

Thanks for your insights. I'd like to ask, is this really as big of a deal for RAID systems as people make it out to be? I come from a perspective of "never trust the disks". This is why backups and HA (if you can afford it) are so important. There seems to be a case that the disks are perhaps slower to resilver or restore a RAID to a healthy (undegraded) state. But how big of a deal is this? I must be honest, I never knew that CMR/SMR technologies were a thing before this scandal so I place less emphasis on it than many others. While my perspective of the OEMs is altered due to these events, I'm not necessarily willing to write any of them off or boycott them (yet). I'm curious if someone can boil down to a non-storage-expert why I should worry about this and whether it's worth the time increased expense to worry about it. Why upgrade to CMR disks when I could instead buy more SMR disks for larger redundancy or backup arrays?

[@Olivia-W]

Yes. It is a big deal. An SMR drive can take days longer to rebuild, and has a higher risk of failing the rebuild altogether. Now, if you take these drives on purpose, that's great. If you're just looking to continue arrays that have worked before, unknowingly using an SMR drive can really mess things up.

[@miscbits6399]

These drives are sold into consumer markets and that means WD, WG and Toshib walk directly into the jaws of CONSUMER protection laws. What's at issue is the principle of equivalence: a manufacturer can substitute something of EQUAL quality for an established product. What they can't do is substitute something that is "almost" the same, or which will break badly when the product is used in ways the old device was fine with. A drive that works fine for 10 minutes of writes then turns to custard fails that test miserably and if the drivemakers are giving any trouble of kickback on this then the first port of call for most people culd be small claims filings - the reason being that it's cheap and quick to file, hearings are quick and you WILL get all your filing fees back when you win and lawyers are banned from small claims courts. Yes, you could jump onto some class action suit but it will drag on forever and at the end of the day you're likely to get $10 out of it, instead of a replacement drive or full refund - and let's face it, what most of us want is either a working replacement or a refund so we can go purchase a working replacement. People should ALSO bear in mind that for companies like WD/SG/Toshiba, they would _prefer_ to face class action lawsuits than thousands or millions of small claims actions - it's known as the death of a million papercuts when that kind of thing happens and can cost a company hundreds of times more than dealing with class action suits. What that means is that once the small claims filings start rolling in they're more likely to adopt conciliatory tones to placate customers

[@LeonardTavast]

SMR should only be used as a bridging technology between SSD and magnetic tape in datacenters. SMR is not suitable for consumers. With this scandal I predict that consumer devices will finally shift away from HDDs completely. The pulling forces from the NVMe SSDs in PS5 and XBOX SX and the coming shift to 12VO PSUs will make it hard to justify SATA HDDs (especially SMR HDDs) in the consumer space. If you need more storage as a consumer there will still be some CMR HDDs available for use in NAS and similar use cases for a while yet.

[@killer2600]

When SSD's in the consumer space are cheaper to make and sell than HDD's, then and only then will HDD's go away.

[@Chrissy4605]

That they, WD, Seagate, and Toshiba, need to use SMR to compete is fine as long as they tell all their consumers why they are using this design. This wouldn't have come to a head like this if they had seen fit to provide that information in the first place. Now they are being dragged over the coals for that minor oversite.

[@TIPER2K]

Good video! I really liked it! comparing 1Tb SSD with 1Tb HDD makes no sense ... what about €/Tb ratio? storage necessity? and usages? Redundancy? security? RAID? NAS?

[@DmitriyDarkJoney]

Don't forget, that the cheap cacheless SSDs have a serious issues with writing too. For example, BX500, TR200 fail after 10GB written to 60-110 mb/s, and others like Apacer Panther and TEAM GX1 for example they go crazy between 10-350 mb/s... Cheap NVMes do this too. Of cource, if you pick EVO, MX500, IRDM, e.t.c. writing will be fine... Also there are a QLC drives... Well, thanks to a effective managers and greedy manufacturers....

[@sysghost]

Not long ago I went to the store to buy a few drives for my NAS. Configured in a LVM manner (similar to RAID) After some "weird performance issues" I went back to the store asking them about it. They decided to test the drives. They concluded them as "defect". The new ones I got back had the same "fault". Now the store started to wonder what the eff is going on, so they went ahead and picked out a larger batch of drives to test. Guess what... They all had the same "fault" Poor performance in some specific scenarios. I cancelled the order and got my money back, and the store started to have a conversation with the manufacturer about a "faulty batch of drives". A few weeks later... Store return to me telling me that the drives I returned had no flaws nor did the rest of their batch. They where simply SMR drives. "Hey... didn't I explicitly ask for non-SMR drives when I asked back then?" I asked. The store acknowledges that they recall that request. Even they didn't know the drives where SMR until the manufacturer told them. There were nor marking on the label indicating this, nor was there any such mentions on the manufacturer's website. After some time I came to the conclusion that one will have a really hard time getting CMR or any non-SMR drives nowadays. Even the low capacity 2TB drives are likely to be SMR nowadays. Knowing this I can adapt the LVM configuration and tune the file system to take this into account to remedy some of the performance loss. I accept that this is the future for "spinning rust" drives. If only manufacturers were willing to mark/label their drives accordingly it would've been a lot easier for everyone involved. Not marking drives SMR when they are?... such a scumbag move!

[@soniclab-cnc]

I have had to replace a bunch of older Red drives in the last few months... Now I don't know what ones are SMR or what. Do I replace all 24 Red drives?! I guess my next array will be another brand. This will likely effect consumer choices in the future... it will certainly steer me away from WD.

[@DmitriyDarkJoney]

EFRX is PMR, EFAX IS SMR.

[@soiTasTic]

It's not even much cheaper, currently the WD Red 4TB EFAX SMR is 108€, compared to the CMR EFRX for 113.80€.. you barely save 6€.. and you trade that for massively reduced performance once it starts filling up..

[@btally]

I'm always in the market for more drives for my RAID setups. This has made my choice easier as WD is not on the table for me any more. My research will now have to include confirmation of CMR. I've always trusted Seagate and I have no reason yet to switch.

[@ciaduck]

"ZFS Just made it into a major linux distro yesterday." What? I've been using native ZFS in Ubuntu since 16.04. Where have you been?

[@ServeTheHomeVideo]

Probably better stated as into the desktop installer of a major distro.

[@ciaduck]

Yes. It is very new to the installer. That was "experimental" in 18.04, I think.

[@duncanyoung9705]

I went through all this grief 5 months ago, trying to replace a faild 6TB RED. Finaly figured out that either WD deliberaly lied, or more likely are incompentent (no-one in testing actually thought about what replacing a drive in an array actually entails). I returned the drive as faulty and bought a different branded NAS drive. I will never buy another WD drive. I realize its an emotional response, but I choose not to deal with people I can't trust.

[@gulllars4620]

This is a major trust breaker in WD for me. Hearing the others also switched silently without any spec sheet indication and clear labeling on some consumer/SMB drives is worrying, but WD doing it on their RED and BLACK series (although black only for one 2.5" capacity) will make me take my money elsewhere the next time i'm buying HDD storage. They broke their own sub-brands/series, and you can't trust their consumer/SMB labeling anymore. For specifically non-essential archival storage or a drive to dump data to for mid-long term and delete/overwrite contents bulked SMR may be overall beneficial if the cost delta is big enough. Though I've been moving more to keeping online backups of anything essential and SSDs for any frequently accessed data. My local HDD bulk storage is mostly for convenience at this point, but also serves as another logical/physical instance for backups. I wouldn't trust a single physical or logical instance of storage with anything i couldn't afford to lose.

[@jimmydandy9364]

It's easy to tell before you buy - look at the CACHE. Example, a Seagate 2TB w/64MB is NOT an SMR drive, it is a PMR drive. But a Seagate 2TB w/128MB or more is a SMR drive,

[@bertjedekat]

Clicked this video thinking it would be ASMR drives spinning

[@paulbritton1436]

Yeah, I got screwed on my first NAS at the beginning of the year. Bought (2) WD Red 6tbs - **thought** I was buying good NAS drives, turned out I got cheated

[@WaynesData]

Thanks for the heads up. Building raid 6 server to store dead wife pics and videos. Using 4 1tb Seagate SkyHawk Surveillance drives

[@DannyTan6675]

I'm still having difficulty wrapping my head around this, the only downside I've really learned from this video with regards to SMR is the lower end random read and write performance. I can gather from the conclusion and the comments that SMR is dangerous for certain types of RAID arrays and arrays that currently contain CMR drives, but exactly how they are hasn't really been explained all that well to me in the video. This is concerning because I plan to setup a NAS in my own home for data storage in the future. I'd appreciate it if anyone could explain these dangers to more elaborately.

[@railotaku]

My understanding is that many NAS systems are of the view that slow drive response times can indicate a potential drive failure. During a rebuild following a drive failure the NAS spams the remaining drives with random read and writes as it rebuilds the data. This quickly fills the SMR drive buffer as the drive has to re-lay out all the tracks in the block where data was changed, so the drive's response times increase to 20 to 30 seconds*, all the extra writes/reads mean the drive will also get very hot too and may overheat if high temperatures are sustained**. If this happens too many times the drive is liable to be marked as failed as well. Depending on your redundancy that could mean data loss if the previous rebuild was not complete if the SMR gets booted. Should also add that mixing CMR and SMR is a bad idea because many NAS systems will assume the one drive that's always holding things up is a possible failure. Now in theory the NAS manufacturers could update their firmware/software to account for SMR drives and their 'issues', but the drive manufactures don't just hide it on the label, often the drive will try and hide it from the computer as well, some drives may tell you they support TRIM (just like SSDs), that usually indicates SMR, but others do not. The manufacturers will not publish a list of which models are SMR, so far much of the work as to IDing what a particular model uses has been through people like smartmontools poking at the SMART data and drive performance for opensource tools *Copying 100GB of small files onto an SMR external the other day took over 8 hours! At points the drive was down to 60 bytes/s **With SMR in the mix I'm aware of rebuilds taking over a week, so an overheat is very possible.

[@samdeur]

Thanks for the content really interesting.. 100% agree disclosure is key for Trust. Manufacturers should tell us and give us options.. so i can choose to pay a couple of euros more to replace a 2TB disk in my nas. i can't afford to replace all disks to 10TB but i have one disk that failed so now i'm looking to replace 2 disks and i'm going for the more expensive CMR..

[@Canadian789119]

encryption? Does this mean encryption can leak?

[@marshallschaffer3721]

Very useful. Thanks!