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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 i

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.

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.