3 ms·

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 hype

• mindslight 6y 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 6y 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.
    • tracker1 6y ago
      You expect a networked file system accessed by multiple users to not have random writes?
      • sitkack 6y ago
        For some value of expect, yes.
    • wtallis 6y ago
      > No file system should be doing random writes, A typical size for a SMR zone is 256MB, and any writes that aren't appending sequentially to what's already been written to that zone count as "random writes" on a SMR drive. That's an absolutely massive block size to expect filesystems to work around, and I doubt there are any commonly used filesystems that can store their metadata in a SMR-friendly way.
      • sitkack 6y ago
        Metadata belongs in persistent storage (PMEM or flash), file contents can striped onto a magnetic disk. Flash suffers from the same problem. Rewriting a file should be appending binary diffs to a log and reapply the writes against the first version into a new location on the cluster. SMR is extremely painful for anyone except those that can handle distributed storage systems. I think the only place where SMR makes sense for home users is in a DVR, or game assets where a virtual disk is streamed down from a cloud provider in a single pass, and no interior mutations.
        • wtallis 6y ago
          Ok, so when you say "no file system should be doing random writes", you should make it clear that you're not trying to describe file systems that actually exist in any sort of production-ready state. I would generally agree with a statement that new filesystems should be designed to avoid random writes except to solid state media. But for users wanting to deploy a real filesystem now to commodity hardware, the recommendation has to be "avoid SMR", not "use a smarter FS and tiered storage hardware".
          • sitkack 6y ago
            Correct. SMR should be sold to tiered storage providers OR SMR drives should include a scratch flash or pmem device to hide the large write amplification of rewriting a block (ala back to tiered storage). HN is fringe, I am not making statements about people with drobos.
      • Dylan16807 6y ago
  • ethbro 6y ago
    The product lines were driven by the fact that margins were low: attempting to decommodify via artificial use segmentation. Shucking has always had weird economics. I think mostly because it's used by the manufacturers as a release-value for excess capacity, in an attempt to somewhat avoid the memory chip boom-bust cycle.
  • novok 6y ago
    I though the red drives had more physical vibration dampening (rubber?) than the other ones.