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Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording
- basicplus2 7y ago"The Synology forum poster said he called WD support to ask if the drive was an SMR or conventionally recorded drive..... the higher team contacted me back and informed me that the information I requested about whether or not the WD60EFAX was a SMR or PMR would not be provided to me. They said that information is not disclosed to consumers"
- BadBadJellyBean 7y agoThat sounds rather deceptive
- gowld 7y agoI don't know or care about shingled, thatch, whatever, but I am not going to entrust my irreplaceable data to a vendor that refuses to tell me or anyone else what they are selling.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- justinclift 7y ago> “In a typical small business/home NAS environment, workloads tend to be bursty in nature, leaving sufficient idle time for garbage collection and other maintenance operations.” Only up until the array needs to be rebuilt (eg replacing a drive). At which point the workload is the literal opposite of "bursty with idle time". :(
- reitzensteinm 7y agoDoes SMR impose a penalty on reading? My understanding is that it removes the ability to do random writes, since you'll disturb the nearby tracks. Like drawing pen thickness rings with a sharpie by overlapping them. Instead you read data in, modify it, then write it out, like an extreme version of updating a byte in a cache line. Your ability to read is more precise, so you have no trouble reading data laid out in this way. Large contiguous writes are also pretty quick. I've owned one, and if you stick to large files it's fine. Pathological workloads like creating millions of small files can take days.
- klodolph 7y agoSMR doesn’t impose a penalty on reading, but DM-SMR must impose a penalty, by its nature.
- londons_explore 7y agoI'm not sure if drives do this, but it's theoretically possible to linearize a random write workload, with the disadvantage that when you come to read the data, a sequential read becomes a random read. Typically stuff you write randomly (small files, databases) one tends to read randomly, so it's usually worth linearizing writes. The only case where you are at a performance disadvantage is when you did random writes followed by more than one linear read. Things like LogFS do this, as do most SSD's. I'm pretty surprised modern HD's don't do it internally too.
- mikepurvis 7y ago> theoretically possible to linearize a random write workload Are there filesystems or databases which are specially designed to optimize for this constraint? It would basically boil down to structuring your whole system as a set of interlinked mostly-append journals.
- barrkel 7y agoYes, they're called log-structured file systems. Been around for decades, lots of research.
- londons_explore 7y agoBigtable is exactly this. An entire database is saved in a small number of files which are are append-only (and therefore can be written fully linearly). Reads of a single record usually only read a single disk block. In-memory indexes to locate the block are fairly small, even for 1B+ records. Reads of a range of records do N range reads of blocks, where N is typically < 5, and the number of bytes read compared to the number of bytes returned to the user is typically <10% overhead.
- deleted 7y ago
- vetinari 7y agoRebuilding is not random i/o though, it goes sequentially and that's what SMRs are good at. Still, I did recently reshape from 4x6TB raid5 to 5x6TB raid6. The new drive was SMR WD Red, it took 12 days and I was quite pissed when I found out the SMR bit. It wasn't in the datasheet, if I knew upfront, I would never bought it.
- syshum 7y ago>> I knew upfront, I would never bought it. SMR has a terrible rep for a reason, and no one with any knowlege of what SMR is would buy which is why they have to be unethical by removing this spec from the spec sheets SMR is cheaper for them to manufacture, and is TERRIBLE technology that really has very little actual use case, except Archive storage. The manufacturers want to push SMR for more than that because it is more profitable for them
- zozbot234 7y ago> SMR is cheaper for them to manufacture, and is TERRIBLE technology It's not that terrible if the customer knows what they're getting. It's just that SMR competes with tape more so than with conventional (CMR) hard drives. Many workloads are good enough for SMR.
- syshum 7y ago>>Many workloads are good enough for SMR. One workload is, which is what you said.. Archiving, what one would normally do to Tape. Everything else is is substandard and should not be used
- chmod775 7y agoBut what if you need random reads? SMR sounds like it's great (value) at providing random read access to large amounts of data if you only have sequential writes or infrequent writes.
- 7y ago
- numpad0 7y agoHave anyone seen an MD04ACA400 fail btw? Wondering should I replace it with MN or MG or just go elsewhere, I’ve seen DT being said not as good though.
- leetbulb 7y agoFWIW Backblaze has the ABA model in their report: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2019/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2019/
- pedrocr 7y agoThe Toshiba and Seagate NAS lines seem well organized and better alternatives these days. And I guess this is all the more reason to get one drive per manufacturer for the typical ~4 drives in a home NAS. Between Seagate/Toshiba/WD/HGST there should be enough variation to still protect against this stuff.
- s9w 7y agoHGST = WD. And with seagate being kinda shitty, there seems to be only Toshiba left.
- pedrocr 7y agoThey're the same company but not (yet?) the same drives.
- s9w 7y agoDo we really know? I see no reason to trust them
- leetbulb 7y agoIn the past year I've had these failures: 2x WD RED 4TB (EFRX), 2x WD RED 6TB (EFRX), 1x Seagate 4TB. I have a fairly even mix that includes HGST (and a few HGST He). No HGST failures yet. I won't be buying WD RED's for a while, if ever.
- barrkel 7y agoTo counter that, I've been running 11x 4TB WD Red (WD40EFRX) since 2013 and zero failures, with 10 drives in RAIDZ2 and 1 warm spare. I have them in a 4U chassis in the attic, with 5 case fans blowing through; two on the rear and three across all the bays. It's a 24 bay box, but I've not yet had pressing need to fill the rest of the bays.
- 7y ago
- jl6 7y agoSo is the independent product review industry so broken that nobody spotted this in testing?
- tibbydudeza 7y agoIt is like those massive PC Magazine laser printer reviews decades back ... nobody cares anymore even the cheapest crud is good enough. Reviews these days are rather all about GPU's and CPU's.
- jl6 7y agoMy guess is that a decent review of a hard drive takes a non-trivial amount of work: review unit acquisition, test setup, test execution, test repetition, analysis, writeup, publishing, ... And that work needs to be paid for. And nobody buys review magazines any more. And advertising revenue on review sites can only pay for a small handful of SKUs to be reviewed. So only the sexiest, mass-marketest units get reviewed. And the vendors fly under the review radar by flooding the market with so many variants that there isn’t enough funding to review more than a tiny fraction of them. And by the time any headway is made into reviewing current models, new ones are released and suddenly nobody is interested in the old ones, further squeezing the window of opportunity for advertising revenue. And eliminating entirely the incentive for long-term testing. Meanwhile, review sites realise they can get paid more in bribes/freebies/access than in advertising, and either outright compromise their reviews or only report the hits and never the misses. And so consumers are flying blind, trying to extract signal from the noise of furious churn.
- pjc50 7y ago> Meanwhile, review sites realise they can get paid more in bribes/freebies/access than in advertising, and either outright compromise their reviews or only report the hits and never the misses. Pretty much. Like the rest of news, accuracy is expensive, entertainment is cheaper, and anyway the audience prefer the latter.
- ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
- tibbydudeza 7y agoMy understanding is that the SMR drives are like SSD to a degree that they needs rather intelligent firmware to place the information on the disk. At the moment everything is sitting behind the bogo SATA disk interface which was never designed for this type of storage - rapid burst writes to the 20GB onboard buffer area and than very slow I/O as it is emptied out. Surely a native OS interface would be better for these drives.
- nicoburns 7y agoIt's worse than that. SMR drives can't do random writes without rewriting large sections. So they are entirely unsuitable for general purpose workloads.
- eru 7y agoWeren't journalling filesystems supposed to help with bad random write performance?
- tveita 7y agoFile system journaling typically refers to a log that helps ensure filesystem consistency by recording attempted operations before they happen, but the system still has to do all the same random writes to the disk afterwards. Some file systems (notably ZFS and Btrfs) use a copy-on-write approach that should in theory not require many random writes, but I don't think any of them are adapted for the large blocks you need to write to for SMR. (256MB?) It should be possible to make a filesystem with drastically better performance on SMR drives given the right low-level access, probably based on something more like a log-structured merge-tree, like e.g. LevelDB. One interesting example I found was Dropbox which seems to store data on SMR in big immutable chunks using raw Zoned Block Command access. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/smr-what-we-learned-in-our-first-year https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/smr-what-we-learned-in-o...
- klodolph 7y ago> It should be possible to make a filesystem with drastically better performance on SMR drives given the right low-level access, probably based on something more like a log-structured merge-tree, like e.g. LevelDB. The filesystem would need to do periodic compaction. You would necessarily encounter situations where a write to “allocated” data would fail because the disk is out of space, which is a new, surprising error that would undoubtedly confuse some user-space programs.
- boomboomsubban 7y agoIs this happening on the Red Pro hard drives, their enterprise versions? If not, it sounds like a fairly standard hard drive company marketing move, fine for NAS as long as you use our definition of NAS. Like their megabyte definition change. Disappointing, but not surprising.
- ubercow13 7y agoThe article opens > Some users are experiencing problems adding the latest WD Red NAS drives to RAID arrays No, these drives are not 'fine' for NAS use
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- boomboomsubban 7y agoYou are missing my likely poorly made point, WD seems to have different view of what non-enterprise "NAS use" entails than those users having problems.
- ubercow13 7y agoWhile they might have some concept of what home NAS use is, these drives are literally marked as dead by common NAS filesystems/RAID drivers because the filesystem thinks they are malfunctioning due to them being so slow, when they are first put into an array >keep[s] getting kicked out of RAID arrays due to errors during resilvering This problem is independent of what type of workload you actually use the NAS for.
- boomboomsubban 7y agoSee, by NAS HDD they mean "fit for the rapper Nas," so any problems these users have are their fault for not being Nas. This is hyperbole, but "network attached storage" could basically refer to every hard drive now and not be false advertising. No matter how unacceptable you view this, it's the kind of shit hardware manufacturer's often do.
- lifeisstillgood 7y agoI'm pretty sure this is a similar problem to Securities rating agencies in Finance world Luckily that problem only led to the largest (so far!) recession / crisis humans have seen. Ok snark over, but we have seen things like this before - take steam boiler production mid to late 19C. This took insurance companies simply refusing to insure anyone who did not manufacture boilers to their standards to clean up. Something similar is needed now. Do you know why you cannot claim your covid-19 cancelled holiday from your insurance - because pandemics are not covered by travel insurance - do you know why? Because Re-insurance companies look at the likelihood of pandemics and simply refuse. I think something different is needed - I think insurance is related to it. Basically we treat government as the insurer of last resort - but we have no real idea of the costs we are shouldering - or the risks we are ignoring. So what if we had to have obligatory true cost insurance? Buy a house? great is it insured against flooding? Now you built on a flood plain like half of England. Fine your premiums are now twice the cost of your mortgage. Are you selling crappy products through your business? Great please show business insurance that will make the people you rip off whole. Don't have that insurance? good luck getting anyone to buy off you. Ok ok it's still a idea very early alpha
- dx034 7y ago> Because Re-insurance companies look at the likelihood of pandemics and simply refuse. I believe it's not likelihood alone. It's a combination of very low likelihood, very high cost event that doesn't make it worth it for most. In the end it likely wasn't the re-insurers decision. They cover pretty much everything for the right price, also pandemics. But no end-customer would've paid the extra price for pandemic coverage so no insurers used it. Unless it's outright illegal I've yet to hear of an event that no insurance company would cover.
- Geeflow 7y agoA nice example of "ensurers will ensure everything" is the Ansari X Prize (space competition). They ensured against someone actually winning the competition: > The funding for the US $10,000,000 prize was unconventional in being "backed by an insurance policy to guarantee that the $10 million is in place on the day that the prize is won." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansari_X_Prize#Funding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansari_X_Prize#Funding
- Thev00d00 7y agoWow, why would they risk their brand like that. Seems silly.
- prepend 7y agoIsn’t the hard drive space all owned by WD since they bought Seagate? It doesn’t matter as much to their brand because there’s no competition in this area of large platter drives.
- Ratiofarmings 7y agoThey bought HGST, not Seagate.
- sunkenvicar 7y agoThe WD and Red brands turned worthless overnight. I used to buy these drives without thinking. Now what do I buy?
- mlvljr 7y agoThe only two times my HDDS failed, was with WD. The first one was after the shipping refurbished as new in 2000s scandal.
- johnchristopher 7y agoThat's a problem. I have been using and recommending WD to everyone who asks me what drive they should buy (based on backblaze data and 20 years of personal experience) for their private and everyday usage. Even though these are NAS drives it tarnishes the brand.
- 8fingerlouie 7y agoDoes the revelation that they use SMR somehow change their reliability or performance ? I fail to see how it makes the drives any less useful only because it is revealed that it is SMR and not PMR. It is models from 2TB to 6TB, meaning pretty much all NAS drives purchased in the past decade. I don't know about yours, by my drives perform just as well as they did yesterday.
- paol 7y ago> Does the revelation that they use SMR somehow change their reliability or performance ? Yes, as plainly stated in the article > much all NAS drives purchased in the past decade These are new models that have been introduced in the past year. You may not (probably don't) have any of them.
- jsjohnst 7y ago> It is models from 2TB to 6TB, meaning pretty much all NAS drives purchased in the past decade. 1. SMR didn’t really exist in the market a decade ago, definitely not for non-enterprise grade NAS drives 2. This is a fairly recent change to use DM-SMR and not explicitly market it as such 3. Your drive performance needs != to everyone else buying NAS drives needs.
- callahad 7y agoThe article implies that's only recent revisions of the 2-6 TB products that use SMR, noting issues with "the latest iteration of WD REDs (WDx0EFAX replacing WDx0EFRX)"
- johnchristopher 7y ago> Does the revelation that they use SMR somehow change their reliability or performance ? As I clearly stated: my concern is about brand damage.
- kruuuder 7y agoI don't understand enough of the technical details in the article - can someone please explain what this means in practice? I use WD Reds in my Synology NAS in a SHR configuration for daily backups. Should I be worried? Should I replace the disks with other models? What are the risks if I keep the current configuration?
- stingraycharles 7y agoEssentially they’re selling disks as “raid compatible”. This implies the disk will perform well under constant pressure: resilvering a raid disk of these sizes can easily take several days. However, they have cut corners / optimized costs that assumes the drive is not under constant pressure, but rather mostly idle. What this implies is that they likely just have a hybrid magnetic/ssd backend, which is what the outrage is about.
- the8472 7y ago> What this implies is that they likely just have a hybrid magnetic/ssd backend No need for hybrids. DM-SMR drives usually have a non-SMR zone acting as a write buffer, similar to the SLC write buffers in non-SLC SSDs.
- klodolph 7y agoWell, you’re right, but technically that makes it “hybrid SMR”.
- notRobot 7y agoThis has been discussed a bit on r/DataHoarder, you might want to go read there.
- emilburzo 7y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/g1di7w/wd_admits_red_nas_drives_2tb6tb_are_smr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/g1di7w/wd_admi...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- qwerty456127 7y agoI have got some old 2TB reds. Is there a a way to check if a drive is SMR given its serial, part or model number?
- Silhouette 7y agoBased on the reports cited in the article, it looks like earlier models (WDx0EFRX) were not SMR, but newer ones (WDx0EFAX) are, up to 6TB. Their larger disks are still claimed to be CMR at the moment, though how much credibility anyone should give a WD spokesperson at this point is obviously open to debate.
- leetbulb 7y agoFunny, EFAX must be horrible then. All of my dead WD REDs are EFRX.
- qwerty456127 7y agoSame tihing. I just hope I'm going to be able to get more 2GB EFRXes.
- read_if_gay_ 7y agoIf they are old, they aren't SMR. In the article it is stated that only past year's models are affected. SMR itself is also only a few years old.
- klodolph 7y agoThat’s right, SMR has only appeared in hard drives recently, although SMR has been used in other media (like tape) for a long time.
- qilo 7y agoThe general rule I use is to look at the DRAM size, if it is: * 256 MB (or more) - most likely it’s an SMR drive * 64-128 MB almost guaranteed it’s an PMR drive I base this on my observation, that I’ve never seen an SMR drive with less than 256 MB of cache.
- reacharavindh 7y agoTrust is a bitch - so hard to gain it, and very very easy to lose by doing shit like this. I was buying WD/HGST drives for work. Now, I have to test everything I buy before deploying them dammit.
- stardude900 7y agoWe are in the same boat.
- solarkraft 7y agoCan this be constructed as lying? I'd be interested whether this might be ground for a lawsuit.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TheKarateKid 7y agoIt should be. It’s a very different technology being sold under the same brand and model, and it doesn’t function exactly the same. I hope they have a class action suit coming.
- prepend 7y agoIt seems pretty calculated to reduce costs while deceiving the buyer by omitting or having an incorrect spec sheet. Would a class action suit help to prevent this kind of action in the future? Perhaps the punitive fine will make the cost calculations that led to this decision different since they will need to include the risk of judgement in the costs.
- dbuder 7y agoThey already made that calculation and decided to roll the dice.
- sircastor 7y agoI would imagine not. The class action would settle, most consumers would get a trivial sum in the form of a check, and the litigating firm would get a large payout. The settlement would result in no one taking responsibility for anything.
- prepend 7y agoI was thinking in terms of being punitive. Litigation firm gets a lot. Buyers get a $4 check, WD pays $35M or something.
- nottorp 7y agoHmm this is scary. I still need reasonably fast spinny disks (getting enough ssd space is too expensive, so two tiers). Up to now I was assuming any random 7200 rpm drive will do. Apparently I now need to be extremely cautious?
- zajio1am 7y agoFrom WD comment: "Currently, Western Digital’s WD Red 2TB-6TB drives are device-managed SMR (DMSMR). WD Red 8TB-14TB drives are CMR-based." This does not make sense - why smaller disks are SMR, while larger ones are CMR? Perhaps they just switched that in comment?
- simias 7y agoMaybe they refreshed their 2-6TB line recently and not the 8-14TB and it'll come later? Maybe the market for 8-14TB is different enough that it warrants CMS? For instance maybe the 2-6TB is for hobbyists/small companies who might not realize the drives behave differently while the larger and more expensive drives are more often use in large companies with dedicated IT who would realize something is off? Given that TFA mainly mentions 2-6TB several times I doubt they got it wrong.
- disiplus 7y agomaybe the testing showed that the 8-14 would fail in rebuild but the 2-6 where small enough that would pass. or that the 8-14 where used in "serious business" where you could not fake your way around and the smaller ones for consumers or smaller firms would not notice or could not cause bigger harm.
- throwaheyy 7y agoI was wondering about this too, and I think it’s for cost-cutting on the lowest-margin products in the range. SMR is going to reduce platter size and quality requirements for a given size in GB (because the data is packed more densely). A given capacity can require fewer platters/sides, or a blemished platter can now be used where it couldn’t previously.
- duskwuff 7y ago> Perhaps they just switched that in comment? No, I think that's correct. It's definitely weird, but it's consistent with what users have observed.
- donmcronald 7y ago
- solarkraft 7y agoAre the 8TB-14TB drives actually fully cleared? I assume this is all about the official Red (EFAX) line - I own a WD100EMAZ drive (10TB, obtained from an Elements Desktop case) the performance of which has been a little disappointing - I suspect it might be shingled as well.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoChecks stock...hasn’t even gone down. Your current “efficient market”, ladies and gentlemen.
- TheHypnotist 7y agoYour average investor doesn't know yet or doesn't care yet. Also, pre-market.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoOh I see the pre-market is down a little, maybe there’s hope. I still find it hard to believe no one knew about this until this day.
- greenshackle2 7y agoIf you think people already knew, why do you expect the stock to go down today? If people already knew, EMH says it was already priced in. Your point is weak anyway, it is like claiming climate change is false because of today's weather. Stock prices move everyday for many reasons, you can't say bad news had no effect just because the price didn't go down compared to yesterday. It's possible the price would have gone up more without the bad news.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoI'm saying I would expect the stock to have performed differently recently as more people found out. I checked and it seemed to behave exactly the same as other stocks.
- dbuder 7y agoPeople knew for months, for sure.
- ComputerGuru 7y agoFor all the "can't trust HGST because its owned by WD" comments: I don't think this is the case, as HGST is still selling drives that are explicitly declared to be PMR is the datasheets, e.g. here's the HGST Ultrastar DC520 [0] which includes PMR as one of its selling points. [0]: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/data-center-drives/ultrastar-dc-hc500-series/data-sheet-ultrastar-dc-hc520.pdf https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...
- p1necone 7y agoEh I still wouldn't want to give money to a company that's segmented itself into a "lie to the customer" branch and a "don't lie to the customer" branch. The former will poison the latter eventually.
- ngcc_hk 7y agoJust bought 16 HGST Ultrastar ... Not sure I can believe in that.
- kup0 7y agoI would think that one would typically expect NAS drives in particular not to use SMR, especially since SMR is known to be problematic in RAID setups, etc. Not to mention the write performance issues. It's so frustrating that all that was needed to avoid most of this was some transparency. At least list in the specs that they have SMR. It's essentially lying by omission. But I'd probably go a step further and say that marketing an SMR drive as a NAS drive is user-hostile and destined to cause problems
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y agoAgreed. I will add that the general trend seems to assume that user is a functional idiot and keep actual specs either hidden away or difficult to get to. It is hard to make informed decisions in such environment.
- Osiris 7y agoWhy are they using SMR on small capacity drives? I thought the driving force behind SMR was for higher capacity? I know cheaper 8TB+ drives use SMR. Is it so they can use fewer platters to get the same capacity, thus reducing the manufacturing cost of the drive? Or is there some other technical reason to do it on low capacity drives?
- en4bz 7y agoDoes this apply to Red Pro drives too?
- baybal2 7y agoA funny thing about device managed HMR (DMSMR) is that they extensively rely on error correction codes to recover data from overwritten tracks, and loose near all of SMR density gain to extra coding. Why DMSMR became a thing in the first place? Windows! And non-upgradeable proprietary storage array hardware. It seems that business people in those storage companies have put big money into SMR, but only realised that an extremely big chunk of the market cannot adopt SMR after drives shipped. And so they simply slapped a cheap and easy firmware hack on top of SMR drives to make them work with non-SMR aware software.
- namibj 7y agoWhere can one buy SMR drives that the host can at least reliably coerce into not using their cache/staging area? It should be quite feasible to tune/adapt btrfs to exhibit writing patterns that don't make the drive use it's staging area, but it'd still be compatible because the drive would start to make use of that staging area when needed. Some way to overwrite the superblocks without triggering SMR problems or something like that would be nice, but that's of lower importance to me, at least. Just supporting TRIM and exposing/documenting the SMR layout/regions would be enough, I think. I'd like to buy that.
- baybal2 7y ago> Where can one buy SMR drives that the host can at least reliably coerce into not using their cache/staging area? From salesmen of "enterprise class" overpriced hardware. https://www.westerndigital.com/products/data-center-drives/ultrastar-dc-hc600-series-hdd https://www.westerndigital.com/products/data-center-drives/u...
- hlandau 7y agoThere exist "host-managed SMR" drives. In the SCSI/SAS specifications, these use the "Zoned Block Devices" command set, rather than the SCSI Block Commands (SBC) command set. As far as I can tell it's seemingly impossible for an individual to buy host-managed SMR (ZBC) drives. Presumably they're only sold in bulk to datacentres. Maybe that could change if some demand materialised and was communicated to a suitable retailer...
- mavhc 7y agoResilvering isn't random IO though, it's almost perfect for SMR, one continuous write from sector 0 to the end. I just put a ST8000DM004 8TB drive into my 12 disk raidz2, on zfs 0.8, it took 8 days (so terribly slow 9MB/sec), but no errors resilvering
- dcm360 7y agoResilvering on ZFS in not linear, it is quite some random IO. A ST8000DM004 is capable of linear reads above 200MB/s, and a normal drive should be able to handle the same speeds with linear writes. I would not recommend those drives for use with ZFS from my own experience: one of my drives disappeared after 1.5TB of writes while moving a dataset, and only went online again (with a SMART failure) after a power cycle.
- mavhc 7y agoIsn't that what sequential resilvering in zfs 0.8 means?
- peter_d_sherman 7y agoExcerpt: "However, SMR drives are not intended for random write IO use cases because the write performance is much slower than with a non-SMR drive." Might this be a way to detect SMR usage by allegedly non-SMR drives? Do a whole lot of random write IO -- and time and statistically sort the results?
- wtallis 7y agoIt should be pretty easy to detect SMR. It's probably sufficient to just compare random read and random write performance and look for a big disparity. Probing for cache size and zone size would be a bit trickier.
- p1necone 7y agoSo, who's the most dependable spinning rust company now?
- Paul-ish 7y agoThe FTC should get involved if WD refuses to remedy. To falsely label your products can't be legal. That or class action.
- userbinator 7y agoWhat exactly do companies gain by such deceptive obfuscation and secrecy of the details about the products they sell? Especially when some testing can reveal the truth easily. It seems to be a bit of an industry trend in general, since very old HDD datasheets would specify even things like how many tracks per inch the platters have, how many heads, sectors per track, spindle motor spin-up time, etc. Somewhat recently, the WD Greens famously did not specify their rotational speed. As I alluded to above, HDDs aren't the only things affected by this trend; SSDs, or more precisely NAND flash manufacturers, have become equally secretive about endurance and data retention. Older datasheets were freely available and specified the number of cycles each block could be guaranteed to be rewritten and how long the data would stay, but datasheets for newer flash are basically all NDA-only and even then you won't get the exact details. At least in that case, I suspect they are trying to hide the inconvenient truth of decreasing reliability; software workarounds can only go so far.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago"There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat." -Margin Call It feels like the first two are increasingly taken, so businesses are lazily switching to various versions of #3. I don't know where the regulators and punishment for doing that have gone.
- skyde 7y agoWhat about WD Gold drives ? are they also using shingled magnetic recording
- BLKNSLVR 7y agoDoes this mean anything for the Purple line that are specifically for surveillance applications? My assumption would be that the Purple drives become the default for NAS usage as the surveillance use-case much more closely matches the requirements of a RAID rebuild (a fairly constant write-stream). My anecdata sample size of 3 has WD Red drives priced very closely to equivalently sized WD Purple drives, with WD Black drives a significant percentage more expensive (40% +). Does this mean WD Black drives are the last hold-out against SMR for WD brand?
- ashtonkem 7y agoThe fact that WD is refusing to tell customers basic facts about their products even when called is a huge red flag. There is no legitimate reason to refuse to tell customers about whether or not you’re using SMR on a given drive.
- yencabulator 7y agoFor what it's worth, F2FS performs dramatically better on an external USB shingled disk I have, compared to ext4/btrfs. No "write pause" with it.