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If customers cared enough, wouldn’t someone just market their drives as PMR and this would solve itself? It would make sense to have a lower cost alternative th

If customers cared enough, wouldn’t someone just market their drives as PMR and this would solve itself? It would make sense to have a lower cost alternative that would fulfil most consumer needs though.

Exmoor 6y ago
I can't speak for the drives mentioned in this article, but the WD Red drives were de facto marketed as PMR since the Red line was marketed by WD as the best drives for NAS. It'd be a little like if you went down to the your local Ferrari dealership and bought a Ferrari only to find that they'd started selling a model that couldn't reach 60mph.
- otterley 6y ago
  > WD Red drives were de facto marketed as PMR Do you have a reference? Or any evidence of customers knowing or caring about the internals of the drive before this controversy arose? Claiming that anything is the "best" at something is pure puffery, as we say in the legal trade. Ferrari publishes quantifiable specs on how their vehicles perform; WD does not do so in detail.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    SMR is terrible for NAS setups, particularly RAID5. Absolutely terrible. Under no circumstances should you be putting an SMR drive into your NAS.
    - uluyol 6y ago
      Isn't this a question of throughput? What is the bandwidth of SMR and what workloads can't it support that PMR can? I primarily use my NAS for backups and don't care too much about how slow they are, they finish quickly enough.
      - cthalupa 6y ago
        Try to do a resilver with SMR drives. I just got fucked by this change in models - I had an array full of 6TB WD Reds, had one fail, ordered a replacement. Rebuilding the RAID-Z3 took over 2 weeks. Previous replacements had taken under 2 days - usually under 1. Passing SMR drives off without saying anything, especially when that exact model had been a PMR drive prior, is incredibly anti-customer.
        otterley 6y ago
        I think the real answer here is to demand that disk manufacturers publish performance specifications. This leaves them free to change implementation details (which consumers usually don't know or care about) as long as the published specifications are accurate. Then again, drive manufacturers are also known for changing what the definition of a unit of measurement means. Some of us remember when they arbitrarily changed the definition of a gigabyte nearly 20 years ago from 1<<30 bytes to 10^9 bytes - a nearly 7% difference! (See: https://www.zdnet.com/article/attention-hard-drive-manufacturers-most-people-believe-that-a-kilobyte-is-1024-bytes/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/attention-hard-drive-manufactu...)
        dragontamer 6y ago
        I don't really care if a drive is 150MB/s or 200MB/s. I understand that hard drive manufacturers change their technology on a regular basis (PMR, HAMR, etc. etc.). Adding platters, removing platters, increasing platter density, etc. etc. As hard drives change, so do their performance. What makes this a sore spot, is that SMR drives have something like 1/8th the sustained write performance of PMR drives. Think about how you went from HDD world into the SSD world a few years back. Except do that in reverse. SMR drives are great for archives, but they should never be sold as a mainstream solution, because their performance is so much worse than PMR.
        otterley 6y ago
        > I don't really care if a drive is 150MB/s or 200MB/s. You do care about performance - you say so in the next paragraph. In this case, it is rewrite performance. This is quantifiable and can be disclosed on spec sheets and labeling. I'm not saying the recording method can't be disclosed too, but I think to most consumers, the metrics are more important than the technology.
    - fomine3 6y ago
      The worst thing that WD done is adopting SMR on NAS brand without announce. SMR for parity RAID is completely disaster. Adopting SMR on Desktop brand is acceptable compared to NAS brand, but it should be announced.

Exmoor 6y ago

I can't speak for the drives mentioned in this article, but the WD Red drives were de facto marketed as PMR since the Red line was marketed by WD as the best drives for NAS. It'd be a little like if you went down to the your local Ferrari dealership and bought a Ferrari only to find that they'd started selling a model that couldn't reach 60mph.

otterley 6y ago
> WD Red drives were de facto marketed as PMR Do you have a reference? Or any evidence of customers knowing or caring about the internals of the drive before this controversy arose? Claiming that anything is the "best" at something is pure puffery, as we say in the legal trade. Ferrari publishes quantifiable specs on how their vehicles perform; WD does not do so in detail.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  SMR is terrible for NAS setups, particularly RAID5. Absolutely terrible. Under no circumstances should you be putting an SMR drive into your NAS.
  - uluyol 6y ago
    Isn't this a question of throughput? What is the bandwidth of SMR and what workloads can't it support that PMR can? I primarily use my NAS for backups and don't care too much about how slow they are, they finish quickly enough.
    - cthalupa 6y ago
      Try to do a resilver with SMR drives. I just got fucked by this change in models - I had an array full of 6TB WD Reds, had one fail, ordered a replacement. Rebuilding the RAID-Z3 took over 2 weeks. Previous replacements had taken under 2 days - usually under 1. Passing SMR drives off without saying anything, especially when that exact model had been a PMR drive prior, is incredibly anti-customer.
      - otterley 6y ago
        I think the real answer here is to demand that disk manufacturers publish performance specifications. This leaves them free to change implementation details (which consumers usually don't know or care about) as long as the published specifications are accurate. Then again, drive manufacturers are also known for changing what the definition of a unit of measurement means. Some of us remember when they arbitrarily changed the definition of a gigabyte nearly 20 years ago from 1<<30 bytes to 10^9 bytes - a nearly 7% difference! (See: https://www.zdnet.com/article/attention-hard-drive-manufacturers-most-people-believe-that-a-kilobyte-is-1024-bytes/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/attention-hard-drive-manufactu...)
        dragontamer 6y ago
        I don't really care if a drive is 150MB/s or 200MB/s. I understand that hard drive manufacturers change their technology on a regular basis (PMR, HAMR, etc. etc.). Adding platters, removing platters, increasing platter density, etc. etc. As hard drives change, so do their performance. What makes this a sore spot, is that SMR drives have something like 1/8th the sustained write performance of PMR drives. Think about how you went from HDD world into the SSD world a few years back. Except do that in reverse. SMR drives are great for archives, but they should never be sold as a mainstream solution, because their performance is so much worse than PMR.
        otterley 6y ago
        > I don't really care if a drive is 150MB/s or 200MB/s. You do care about performance - you say so in the next paragraph. In this case, it is rewrite performance. This is quantifiable and can be disclosed on spec sheets and labeling. I'm not saying the recording method can't be disclosed too, but I think to most consumers, the metrics are more important than the technology.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    The worst thing that WD done is adopting SMR on NAS brand without announce. SMR for parity RAID is completely disaster. Adopting SMR on Desktop brand is acceptable compared to NAS brand, but it should be announced.