10 ms·

That'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 exp

That'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 ago
Does 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 ago
  The 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.
  - Felger 7y ago
    Seeing how brittle the SMR Seagate drives are (especially the rosewood family), I'm a little bit concerned.
- simias 7y ago
  >Shingled media recording (SMR) disk drives take advantage of disk write tracks being wider than read tracks to partially overlap write tracks and so enable more tracks to be written to a disk platter. This means more data can be stored on a shingled disk than an ordinary drive. >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. Therefore they are not recommended for NAS use cases featuring significant random write workloads. [...] >We brought all these points to Western Digital’s attention and a spokesperson told us: [...] >"In device-managed SMR HDDs, the drive does its internal data management during idle times. 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." That seems like a pretty notable difference to me. You probably want to know that ahead of buying the drive.
  - derefr 7y ago
    > Therefore they are not recommended for NAS use cases featuring significant random write workloads. Emphasis mine: a NAS featuring "significant random write"s, is not the usual NAS, and might not actually be best described as a NAS at all. In WD's terms, they'd tell you that if you've got e.g. your /var partition mounted over SMB to your NAS, then your NAS is receiving a Desktop workload, and so you should use their Desktop drives in it, not NAS drives. (Consider: the drives backing Amazon EBS—which receive Server workloads—are certainly not "archival media" disks, despite being nominally "network-attached storage" disks.) The use-case for WD Red (NAS) drives is online archival media storage. Like S3 without the high availability. In other words, the thing most people buy a NAS for: backups and home Plex hosting. This is why, I assume, WD don't literally call these drives "WD NAS", but instead just call them "WD Red." Just because you put them in a NAS, doesn't mean they'll function well there. You have to be using them for an idiomatic NAS workload. (Which also means that WD Red drives fare just fine in a desktop or server, too, if you're using them there purely for an idiomatic NAS workload.)
    - detaro 7y ago
      How much of the NAS market is "media storage" and how much of it is "file server in a small/medium business"?
- snvzz 7y ago
  >Does the revelation that they use SMR somehow change their reliability or performance ? Yes, they do not perform anywhere like PMR on writing. It's so bad they simply should _never_ be used on a RAID or Zpool, where they have such pathological behaviour on resilvers that can easily become the trigger for data loss. I would never buy one of these voluntarily, as they'd cause me headaches. So, definitely, I need to know whether what I am buying is SMR or PMR. And wd's behaviour is unacceptable.
  - mmastrac 7y ago
    I wonder if this is why my unraid box has been consistently failing a parity check since I replaced some drives.
- bonestamp2 7y ago
  > I don't know about yours, by my drives perform just as well as they did yesterday. My WD Reds do too, but that's because mine are two years old. The switch to SMR apparently only happened in the most recent model (WDx0EFAX).
- TwoNineFive 7y ago
  Yes, they perform worse, but there is a bigger issue. They lie. The drives report themselves as being PMR when they should be reporting themselves as SMR. They actually lie about their technology type in the firmware.
cptskippy 7y ago
> based on backblaze data I don't get that at all. I've been in the WD camp since the 90s but Backblaze's data has always ranked them around "better than the worst" and slowly eroding my confidence in them. For me, Backblaze's Stats have changed my perception of HGST who I've held in low regard since they were IBM with the whole Deskstar issue.
- mst 7y ago
  The deathstars were amazing. The 60Gb ones that everybody screamed about worked perfectly if you only partitioned them out to 58Gb. Best value for money on the market at the time so long as you remembered you had a 58Gb hard drive and behaved accordingly.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    Can you elaborate on that? I can't find anything else about this.
    - mst 7y ago
      They were well known for failing. The ones I got only failed on the outer edge. Worked out nicely cost-effectiveness wise if you didn't trigger the failure mode.
GuB-42 7y ago
I have stopped caring about hard drive brands. What Backblaze and experience show is how drives of a certain brand performed a couple of years ago, not how the drive you just bought will perform. IBM used to be very good until Deathstars, and now HGST, who took over is among the most reliable. I used to be very satisfied with Seagate, then ST3000DM001 happened, and now, it looks like they are slowly getting back on track. Maybe it is WD turn right now. I don't think there is a way to know until it is too late. Personally, I like to make RAID mirrors with drives of different brands, or at least different models. Even it it is not ideal for performance, it helps making sure that not all drives fail at the same time.
- mixedCase 7y ago
  >and now, it looks like they are slowly getting back on track. The smartmontools ticket linked in the article says that Seagate is doing the same thing. Best to avoid.
  - jlgaddis 7y ago
    Indeed. According to a newer article [0] on the same web site: > Some Seagate Barracuda Compute and Desktop disk drives use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology which can exhibit slow data write speeds. But Seagate documentation does not spell this out. --- [0]: https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-barracuda-and-desktop-hdd-smr/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-ba...
- basch 7y ago
  does WD still make new HGST products? How can you tell which drives are from which team, or have they been blended together?
  - effie 7y ago
    Some HGST tech is Toshiba now, some of it is WD. Hard to know whether WD drive is made up to HGST snuff. If you want the best, buy helium WD drive labeled HGST. If you can't get it, then WD or Toshiba helium datacenter drives should be close.
vermaden 7y ago
Looking at Backblaze I would recommend only Hitachi and Toshiba drives ...
- elabajaba 7y ago
  Western Digital bought HGST in 2012, started folding them into their business in 2015, and phased out the HGST brand in 2018.
  - fishpen0 7y ago
    I worked for Hitachi during that time period and that is mostly true. Hitachi actually sold the division to WD in exchange for private ownership shares of WD with insane leverage because WD had most of their factories flooded in 2011. WD Drives were actually HGST drives with a different label for several years.
mindslight 7y ago
The ridiculous thing is that nobody would have batted an eye if they did this with Green/Blue drives, especially if they just owned it upfront. I still don't particularly get the difference between Red/Green, or even Red/Blue for that matter, apart from opaque firmware tweaks about power saving, and some hand waving about chassis vibration. SMR/PMR would have been an obvious partition. I still can't fathom how companies can be so oblivious about their actual customer market. People speccing individual hard drives are integrating their own systems and want to care about the details, not just some colorful indicator of "good/better/best".
- ethbro 7y ago
  You're talking about an industry that has no problem shipping known-unreliable drives for decades at a time. They likely rebate / warranty their important hyperscale cloud, enterprise, & OEM customers. According to whatever custom contract they've negotiated. And don't really care about the retail segment, given the margins. Most people probably won't notice. And those that do won't be able to do anything.
  - mindslight 7y ago
    They apparently still care enough to create all those Red/Green/Black/Blue/Purple/Gold lines. Even if those are really just a few different #defines and different ink in the label printer, they're still additional SKUs. Also the margins seem plenty high given you can shuck 8TB Easystores for $130, with the retail version at ~$200. And yeah individuals can never really do anything in the short term. Eventually there will be a suite of best practices to test a new drive to make sure it's not SMR, and likely some tweaks to filesystems to ratelimit rebuilds, based on knowing which drives are actually SMR. But they're arbitraging away brand loyalty to WD Red, for a short gain. Given the goodwill they enjoy(ed) from that Blackblaze study creating a refrain of "don't buy Seagate", this just seems foolish.
    - sitkack 7y ago
      No file system should be doing random writes, and when you have a cluster, there is always an open stream you can append to. I agree this is a bogus move, but tech with analogous limitations but also similar enhancements will make it into more things. If risk and failure were spread more evenly, systems would behave more like gas and less like a ceramic.
stiray 7y ago
I have stopped buying WDS and Seagate (their 3tb drives failed sequentially in my zraid in 4 months and I just barely replaced them with new). And I am not buying even brands that were merged with them (here is picture how hdd brands "consolidated" https://www.mydatarecoverylab.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/HDD_Manufacturer_Consolidation.jpg https://www.mydatarecoverylab.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07...). Those companiea must be punished (by not buying their products) for all the mischief they have done to our data for the sake of maximising revenue, they need to be aware it will hurt their bussiness. Now I am having 3xToshiba drives and one Hitachi and for now I am happy.

8fingerlouie 7y ago

Does 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 ago
The 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.
- Felger 7y ago
  Seeing how brittle the SMR Seagate drives are (especially the rosewood family), I'm a little bit concerned.
simias 7y ago
>Shingled media recording (SMR) disk drives take advantage of disk write tracks being wider than read tracks to partially overlap write tracks and so enable more tracks to be written to a disk platter. This means more data can be stored on a shingled disk than an ordinary drive. >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. Therefore they are not recommended for NAS use cases featuring significant random write workloads. [...] >We brought all these points to Western Digital’s attention and a spokesperson told us: [...] >"In device-managed SMR HDDs, the drive does its internal data management during idle times. 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." That seems like a pretty notable difference to me. You probably want to know that ahead of buying the drive.
- derefr 7y ago
  > Therefore they are not recommended for NAS use cases featuring significant random write workloads. Emphasis mine: a NAS featuring "significant random write"s, is not the usual NAS, and might not actually be best described as a NAS at all. In WD's terms, they'd tell you that if you've got e.g. your /var partition mounted over SMB to your NAS, then your NAS is receiving a Desktop workload, and so you should use their Desktop drives in it, not NAS drives. (Consider: the drives backing Amazon EBS—which receive Server workloads—are certainly not "archival media" disks, despite being nominally "network-attached storage" disks.) The use-case for WD Red (NAS) drives is online archival media storage. Like S3 without the high availability. In other words, the thing most people buy a NAS for: backups and home Plex hosting. This is why, I assume, WD don't literally call these drives "WD NAS", but instead just call them "WD Red." Just because you put them in a NAS, doesn't mean they'll function well there. You have to be using them for an idiomatic NAS workload. (Which also means that WD Red drives fare just fine in a desktop or server, too, if you're using them there purely for an idiomatic NAS workload.)
  - detaro 7y ago
    How much of the NAS market is "media storage" and how much of it is "file server in a small/medium business"?
snvzz 7y ago
>Does the revelation that they use SMR somehow change their reliability or performance ? Yes, they do not perform anywhere like PMR on writing. It's so bad they simply should _never_ be used on a RAID or Zpool, where they have such pathological behaviour on resilvers that can easily become the trigger for data loss. I would never buy one of these voluntarily, as they'd cause me headaches. So, definitely, I need to know whether what I am buying is SMR or PMR. And wd's behaviour is unacceptable.
- mmastrac 7y ago
  I wonder if this is why my unraid box has been consistently failing a parity check since I replaced some drives.
bonestamp2 7y ago
> I don't know about yours, by my drives perform just as well as they did yesterday. My WD Reds do too, but that's because mine are two years old. The switch to SMR apparently only happened in the most recent model (WDx0EFAX).
TwoNineFive 7y ago
Yes, they perform worse, but there is a bigger issue. They lie. The drives report themselves as being PMR when they should be reporting themselves as SMR. They actually lie about their technology type in the firmware.

cptskippy 7y ago

> based on backblaze data I don't get that at all. I've been in the WD camp since the 90s but Backblaze's data has always ranked them around "better than the worst" and slowly eroding my confidence in them. For me, Backblaze's Stats have changed my perception of HGST who I've held in low regard since they were IBM with the whole Deskstar issue.

mst 7y ago
The deathstars were amazing. The 60Gb ones that everybody screamed about worked perfectly if you only partitioned them out to 58Gb. Best value for money on the market at the time so long as you remembered you had a 58Gb hard drive and behaved accordingly.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  Can you elaborate on that? I can't find anything else about this.
  - mst 7y ago
    They were well known for failing. The ones I got only failed on the outer edge. Worked out nicely cost-effectiveness wise if you didn't trigger the failure mode.

GuB-42 7y ago

I have stopped caring about hard drive brands. What Backblaze and experience show is how drives of a certain brand performed a couple of years ago, not how the drive you just bought will perform. IBM used to be very good until Deathstars, and now HGST, who took over is among the most reliable. I used to be very satisfied with Seagate, then ST3000DM001 happened, and now, it looks like they are slowly getting back on track. Maybe it is WD turn right now. I don't think there is a way to know until it is too late. Personally, I like to make RAID mirrors with drives of different brands, or at least different models. Even it it is not ideal for performance, it helps making sure that not all drives fail at the same time.

mixedCase 7y ago
>and now, it looks like they are slowly getting back on track. The smartmontools ticket linked in the article says that Seagate is doing the same thing. Best to avoid.
- jlgaddis 7y ago
  Indeed. According to a newer article [0] on the same web site: > Some Seagate Barracuda Compute and Desktop disk drives use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology which can exhibit slow data write speeds. But Seagate documentation does not spell this out. --- [0]: https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-barracuda-and-desktop-hdd-smr/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-ba...
basch 7y ago
does WD still make new HGST products? How can you tell which drives are from which team, or have they been blended together?
- effie 7y ago
  Some HGST tech is Toshiba now, some of it is WD. Hard to know whether WD drive is made up to HGST snuff. If you want the best, buy helium WD drive labeled HGST. If you can't get it, then WD or Toshiba helium datacenter drives should be close.

vermaden 7y ago

Looking at Backblaze I would recommend only Hitachi and Toshiba drives ...

elabajaba 7y ago
Western Digital bought HGST in 2012, started folding them into their business in 2015, and phased out the HGST brand in 2018.
- fishpen0 7y ago
  I worked for Hitachi during that time period and that is mostly true. Hitachi actually sold the division to WD in exchange for private ownership shares of WD with insane leverage because WD had most of their factories flooded in 2011. WD Drives were actually HGST drives with a different label for several years.

mindslight 7y ago

The ridiculous thing is that nobody would have batted an eye if they did this with Green/Blue drives, especially if they just owned it upfront. I still don't particularly get the difference between Red/Green, or even Red/Blue for that matter, apart from opaque firmware tweaks about power saving, and some hand waving about chassis vibration. SMR/PMR would have been an obvious partition. I still can't fathom how companies can be so oblivious about their actual customer market. People speccing individual hard drives are integrating their own systems and want to care about the details, not just some colorful indicator of "good/better/best".

ethbro 7y ago
You're talking about an industry that has no problem shipping known-unreliable drives for decades at a time. They likely rebate / warranty their important hyperscale cloud, enterprise, & OEM customers. According to whatever custom contract they've negotiated. And don't really care about the retail segment, given the margins. Most people probably won't notice. And those that do won't be able to do anything.
- mindslight 7y ago
  They apparently still care enough to create all those Red/Green/Black/Blue/Purple/Gold lines. Even if those are really just a few different #defines and different ink in the label printer, they're still additional SKUs. Also the margins seem plenty high given you can shuck 8TB Easystores for $130, with the retail version at ~$200. And yeah individuals can never really do anything in the short term. Eventually there will be a suite of best practices to test a new drive to make sure it's not SMR, and likely some tweaks to filesystems to ratelimit rebuilds, based on knowing which drives are actually SMR. But they're arbitraging away brand loyalty to WD Red, for a short gain. Given the goodwill they enjoy(ed) from that Blackblaze study creating a refrain of "don't buy Seagate", this just seems foolish.
  - sitkack 7y ago
    No file system should be doing random writes, and when you have a cluster, there is always an open stream you can append to. I agree this is a bogus move, but tech with analogous limitations but also similar enhancements will make it into more things. If risk and failure were spread more evenly, systems would behave more like gas and less like a ceramic.

stiray 7y ago

I have stopped buying WDS and Seagate (their 3tb drives failed sequentially in my zraid in 4 months and I just barely replaced them with new). And I am not buying even brands that were merged with them (here is picture how hdd brands "consolidated" https://www.mydatarecoverylab.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/HDD_Manufacturer_Consolidation.jpg https://www.mydatarecoverylab.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07...). Those companiea must be punished (by not buying their products) for all the mischief they have done to our data for the sake of maximising revenue, they need to be aware it will hurt their bussiness. Now I am having 3xToshiba drives and one Hitachi and for now I am happy.