36 ms·

On WD Red NAS Drives

313 points by hysan 7y ago

gorbachev 7y ago
Western Digital has updated the blog post after this HN post went up and listed the technology used by their different hard drives in an update at the top of the post. All the backlash seems to have worked.
ubercow13 7y ago
>Having built this reputation, we understand that, at times, our drives may be used in system workloads far exceeding their intended uses. A use case which seems to cause failure is inserting a drive into a RAID array. These drives are advertised as being for use in RAID arrays.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  I’m wondering if we’re living on the same planet as these people. They literally put NAS in the name of the drive?? Does NAS drive arrays exist outside of a RAID? Is there such a thing in consumer, prosumer, or professional setups?
  - wl 7y ago
    Single-drive NAS exists. Apple's now-discontinued Time Capsule is probably the most famous example.
    - guitarbill 7y ago
      That true, but isn't exactly the most common use-case, though, or what most people would assume. WD's actions are still inexcusable, especially because the non-SMR and SMR models cost pretty much the same. No savings being passed on to us. Pure greed.
  - Macha 7y ago
    There's plenty of cheap drives sold as NAS drives which have no RAID, or enclosures which default to JBOD, so their suggestion seems to be that the standard Red drives are now only suitable for "Build your own MyBook" use.
  - pmiller2 7y ago
    Yes. Take a look at UnRaid. It’s essentially a drive array with some number of parity drives (like a RAID), but no striping of files across drives.
  - ubercow13 7y ago
    Yep, though they are actually advertised as being for RAID, not just NAS (though NAS is in the name)
  - syshum 7y ago
    THis is in NO WAY a defense of WD, just an awnser to the question "Does NAS drive arrays exist outside of a RAID?" RAID has several levels.. Any RAID that uses Parity will have a problem with SMR, but Mirror and Striped array probally will not A common use case is a 2 Disk Mirror NAS for SMB. Further NAS manufactures like QNap, and even WD do make single disk NAS Appliances However the WD Red line is branded for NAS upto 8 drives, Most likly that will be a RAID5 or 6 array making SMR not usable in that configuration
    - prirun 7y ago
      My understanding is that SMR drives fail because the write load is continuous for a long period of time and overwhelms the background process organizing the data for efficient SMR writes. In a 2-disk mirror (RAID1) rebuild, all data from one drive has to be copied to the other drive, which seems likely to overwhelm an SMR drive. So it would seem to only work in a RAID0 array (concatenated drives - bad idea) or JBOD NAS setup.
tw04 7y ago
"We've rigorously tested up to 8 drives" - bullshit. An 8-bay synology will fail a RAID rebuild every single time. If you're lucky, it'll work after the 3rd retry - which will be about 2 weeks later because of how slow it is. This is a money grab, plain and simple. Had they substituted SMR drives at a lower price they might have a leg to stand on. But as others have mentioned, they didn't - they lied until they got caught and are now pretending like they were up-front. Talk about making a bad situation worse. The headline should've been "We're sorry, here's what we're doing to fix it" - instead it's "there's nothing wrong, it's YOUR fault you caught me cheating".
- sixothree 7y ago
  I think the worst part of this fiasco is that the drives may appear to operate normally until the moment when the raid is most vulnerable.
- rodgerd 7y ago
  I wonder if this explains why a a couple of brand new Red drives have brought down an 8-drive ZFS array for me. Oh, well. i'll return them and keep returning them until they work right.
- imtringued 7y ago
  Companies pretending that nothing is wrong are the worst.
reacharavindh 7y ago
This is making a bad situation , adding oil to it, and lighting it on fire hoping that the problem will go away unnoticed. I have a lot of WD(HGST) (more than 2 PB) in service as of now. I will never buy anything WD until they come clean on shit like this. They should talk to VW about Karma and how it bites your behind.
tyingq 7y ago
This is probably an archival worthy example of corporate PR speak/spin around "we got caught". SMR is pretty clearly not the use case for what they branded "RED" for. Wishing them a VW level wave of karma.
- xattt 7y ago
  They’re also upselling their Red Pro and Gold lines. Sleazy.
  - wegs 7y ago
    I read that as 'for critical applications, buy a competitor's drive.' Perhaps reading comprehension is limited on my part. The key thing I want from a drive is reliability. I don't want to lose my data. That far beats size, noise, speed, cost, or just about anything else in what I will shop on. A drive that loses data will cost my thousands of dollars. My perception of reliability comes down to trust and transparency.If I can't trust a drive maker, I won't buy from them. WD just went into my don't-trust don't-buy pile. I actually don't have any non-critical applications. If my mom's laptop hard drive fails, that's still thousands of dollars of my time helping her. It's no less important than enterprise (indeed, I'd argue more, since she doesn't have RAID).
    - StillBored 6y ago
      Yah, so they have come somewhat clean about SMR, but they have a lot of other bits they have been hiding. Some of it in plain sight. "5400 RPM class" which means what exactly? And of course the whole desktop vs nas differentiation was the early return on error logic being hard coded instead of configurable by the OS/RAID. Remove a feature charge more..
    - glitchc 7y ago
      WD bought out Hitachi's storage business in 2012, so those Ultrastars are still their own, albeit different branding.
      - 7y ago
PaulHoule 7y ago
When is the last time you contacted customer care and got useful advice for a product such as hard drives. I am wary of so many differentiated products out there. Just in case I want to save 5 cents on an SSD so I can get a 50x increase of 95% latency. Reliability is most important and the way you get there is volume. I'd rather see a good drive that is made in large numbers rather than 100 SOUs that can never really be tested.
- maccard 7y ago
  I've been having issues with what I suspect is a faulty powerline adapter from TP-Link. I spent over an hour on the phone to them, factory resetting, for them to decide my issue was solved because the status lights were functioning correctly when I moved both adapters to the same extension lead. There was no option to escalate, continue troubleshooting, nothing. I went back to the Netgear ones I was trying to "upgrade" from.
- ethbro 7y ago
  Ah, customer support, the /dev/null of technical complaints.
  - PaulHoule 7y ago
    I dunno. Often they are good at giving you an RMA for a failed drive.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      Point. So a black hole with an occasional lever for replacement.
      - PaulHoule 7y ago
        What else can they do at scale? A hard drive or SSD is a complex device. Are you going to expect the customer service people help you dump the firmware out that JTAG port? People like that can be trained and equipped with simple diagnostics and remedy options, they can't be expected to get into the fine details of product selection.
dsr_ 7y ago
TL;DR: We know we were concealing a material fact from our customers. Please don't sue us.
- gwerbret 7y ago
  ...except that they didn't say "please".
wronglebowski 7y ago
It seems quite unfortunate we’re coming up the other side of the U shaped price graph for HDD technology. From collusion between the three manufacturers and a consistent push towards flash it’s unlikely we’ll see any further reductions in price per GB without major performance hits like SMR. This wouldn’t be a problem if flash were cheap enough in the volumes required for archival level storage, but it isn’t. Flash storage is actually going up this year as demand continues to increase. I suspect there’s no ready answer for those that hoard data now or in the future.
- core-questions 7y ago
  You sure about that? I remember reading comments like this when drives seemed to be "stuck" in the 300gb range, and again when 1-2tb was about as big as you could get for a while. Now we have 16TB drives; so is there really some issue for those who want to hoard? Honestly, how big is your personal hoard anyway if a few 16TB drives won't cover it? Isn't it the case that at some point you will have amassed more media than you could possibly consume?
  - wronglebowski 7y ago
    In my opinion from the previous price fixing scandals and no real competition between the few major suppliers there's very little driving innovation in this space. Perhaps the major suppliers will get better deals or bigger drives but there's no reason for the players in the market to make a product consumers can buy more appealing. We're such a small part of the market and have such little choice.
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    "640K ought to be enough for anyone." - Unknown It's likely that 16TB won't keep up with further technological advances.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    bluray quality video is about 13GB/hr for 1080p or 33GB/hr for 4K. it's cost prohibitive for people to accumulate a huge amount of this content legally, but torrents are still a thing. it adds up really fast if you aren't willing to prune your collection. there isn't currently a ton of 4K content available, but there's lots of 1080p. if you rip/download enough bluray 1080p to watch an hour every night, that's almost 5TB per year right there. if there were enough 4K content to support your habit, it would be more than 12TB a year.
Causality1 7y ago
WD is far too large a company to have a soul so there is zero chance they're actually sorry.
- ratsmack 7y ago
  It has nothing to do with a soul... it's just the nature of large business to revolve around marketing and accounting to maximize profits, while disregarding sound engineering.
hlandau 7y ago
>SMR is tested and proven technology that enables us to keep up with the growing volume of data for personal and business use. Absolute baloney. SMR is useful if it allows you to attain capacities otherwise unattainable, which isn't the case here. Note that the higher capacity Red drives don't use SMR. Older Red drives of these capacities, and non-Red drives of these capacities, don't use SMR. Also, notice how now they're openly admitting that these are SMR drives. Nowhere in this post do they admit that they previously deliberately concealed this fact. EDIT: Also note that they talk about these being "drive-managed SMR" drives, and they are, but they reportedly don't advertise themselves to the OS as being drive-managed SMR, as they're supposed to do as per the ATA specifications (unlike other WD DMSMR drives which do). They literally designed the drives themselves to lie about this. >Additionally, some of you have recently shared that in certain, more data intensive, continuous read/write use cases, the WD Red HDD-powered NAS systems are not performing as you would expect. They literally built a NAS drive which can't handle RAID, and are acting like this isn't their failing.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ac29 7y ago
  > Also note that they talk about these being "drive-managed SMR" drives, and they are, but they reportedly don't advertise themselves to the OS as being drive-managed SMR, as they're supposed to do as per the ATA specifications (unlike other WD DMSMR drives which do). They literally designed the drives themselves to lie about this. I wonder if reporting to the OS that it is a SMR drive would kick in host-managing SMR code paths that conflict with how the drive managed SMR works. While I'm not terribly inclined to give WD the benefit of the doubt, this seems certainly possible. It seems like it should be possible to test by modifying whatever part of the Linux kernel or userspace tools control this and having it use the model number instead of what the drive reports as its SMR status. Granted on a closed device like a Synology NAS, this isnt possible for a user to do though Synology themselves could, and probably should test this.
  - kalleboo 7y ago
bthrn 7y ago
> If you are encountering performance that is not what you expected, please consider our products designed for intensive workloads. It seems very strange to argue that customers should just know beforehand what they need, while also at the same time acknowledging the hiding (or at the very least, omission) of the information customers need in order to make that decision.
- kstrauser 7y ago
  Yeah, that's terrible advice. They advertise these as high-end prosumer drives. To the product manager at WD who is inevitably reading this: if your hardware doesn't live up to your own marketing, I'm not going to throw more money your way. I'm switching to your competition.
  - magduf 7y ago
    The WD product manager's response: "Bwahahaha!!! Seagate's drives are crap too, and we own Hitachi! Where are you going to go now? Bwahahahaha!"
    - kstrauser 7y ago
      My reply: I'll take my chances with ${not_wd}. At least they can survive a rebuild, so if a drive dies early I can replace it with something else.
    - Tijdreiziger 7y ago
      Toshiba's still around
    - imtringued 7y ago
      We can always stop buying HDDs.
      - magduf 7y ago
        I've read that SSDs can't be used to replace HDDs for long-term archival use: if you leave them powered off for too long, the data degrades. I can store data long-term on a regular HDD and stick in a closet or safe-deposit box and then get it out after a few years, plug it in, and read it just fine.
d4rti 7y ago
Is there a list of known not SMR WD RED drive model numbers? I have 4TB REDs in my Synology but they are a few years old; is there a way I can find out?
- moviuro 7y ago
  > the EFRX is the faster CMR drive, and the EFAX is the much slower SMR drive. From https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-disks-are-being-submarined-into-unexpected-channels/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...
- DavidVoid 7y ago
  Here is a list of known SMR drives [1]. The newer WD##EFAX ones are SMR but if your drive is a few years old then it's probably a WD40EFRX which is NOT a SMR drive. [1] https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/list-of-known-smr-drives.141/ https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/list-of-known-...
  - d4rti 7y ago
    Thanks, it's the EFRX.
  - phire 7y ago
    Except only the EFAX drives with 6TB or less capacity. The 8TB and larger drives use the exact same WD##EFAX model number, but aren't SMR.
  - nonninz 7y ago
    Looks like my RAID NAS at home is safe (from this at least) then. Thank you :)
- Silhouette 7y ago
  Based on the reports a week or so ago: Earlier models (WDx0EFRX) were not SMR. Newer ones (WDx0EFAX) are, up to 6TB.
- spartas 7y ago
mjs33 7y ago
Did the text get cut off? All I read was some corporate PR nonsense, did I miss the real content? Never buying WD drives again!
- shawnz 7y ago
  Agreed, it would have been better if they posted nothing.
j45 7y ago
As an owner of Red drives, it’s surprising WD would trot out a new acronym for in device features to a group already literate in acronyms. It just makes me wonder how easily they believe their customer base can be placated. Had I known I was not receiving what I thought I had purchased, I would have likely purchased a different drive. The least WD could do is unilaterally extend the warranty of these misrepresented drives to easily deal with any fears, if they really believe in their products as such. It will be interesting to see if the MTTB on these drives is in a smaller spectrum of time.
- spartas 7y ago
  Extending the warranties on SMR drives does _nothing_ to solve the performance issues. The drives were marketed for use in NAS RAID systems, but the abysmal performance (due to the drives' SMR) in many cases will cause the NAS or RAID system to kick out the drive as a bad drive. Given that RAID rebuild times are increasing as the size of the drives are increasing, and SMR exacerbates the longer rebuild times, these drives should not be used in the NAS or RAID systems for which that they were marketed. By obfuscating the use of SMR in their WD Red line, WD willfully and intentionally harmed their customers.
  - j45 7y ago
    I agree that it was completely misleading and that extending warranties solves nothing SMR related specifically for performance. An advance ship program to swap drives with SMR is what should happen.
Sholmesy 7y ago
Wow, this is a horrendously bad response, no apology, no admission of guilt, probably written by the legal team. I am a total layman w.r.t Hard Drives, but it seems pretty simple (please correct me if I'm wrong): - They used a technology that impacts performance, that allows them to make higher capacity drives for cheaper. - The technology used prohibits them from being used in certain application context (citation needed/general consensus?) - They marketed the product as being suitable for those certain application contexts, when they aren't. - They come out with a blog, telling consumers to buy their more expensive drives instead?
- hlandau 7y ago
  This is pretty much correct, yes.
- cma 7y ago
  > no omission of guilt Freudian slip?
  - Sholmesy 7y ago
    Ha, fixed. Thanks
- sixothree 7y ago
  > They used a technology that impacts performance I feel like this is an understatement. In certain scenarios for which they were designed, because of this performance issue, they fail to work at all. Maybe that is covered by the following points but I feel like "stops responding" and "impacts performance" are very different things.
- JeremyNT 7y ago
  So it seems like ultimately, what they've done is to move what used to be "Red" into "Red Pro" and make "Red" a more budget oriented line (without clearly communicating this in advance). The only reason to do this is to trick customers into buying the wrong product by accident! There is literally no good faith reading of this change. If they wanted to provide better value for the people who don't mind the SMR performance characteristics, that's great, but that would involve clearly marketing the line as such, not simply redefining what "WD Red" means.
jrockway 7y ago
I didn't have any background on this and didn't know what SMR was. Apparently the background is: people try to add these things to RAID arrays, and when they do some rebalancing, the RAID software rejects the disk. The reason is because they use "SMR", which severely hurts random-write performance. The controversy is that it's pretty shady to sell a drive as a "NAS Drive" when the drive is too slow to be usable with any RAID software. (I will spare you my rant on how bad RAID software is. But this is yet another interesting edge case that RAID software doesn't handle and reacts by just blowing away your data.)
- Majromax 7y ago
  > The reason is because they use "SMR", which severely hurts random-write performance. It hurts random-write performance after a threshold, when an on-disk staging area becomes exhausted. For short bursts, the drive behaves well -- it probably would legitimately work in a RAID array if the array were initialized from a clean slate and not rebuilt. > But this is yet another interesting edge case that RAID software doesn't handle and reacts by just blowing away your data. It's not obvious how a RAID controller should "handle" this. The drives have no outward indication that they suffer from random write saturation. From the controller's perspective, the degraded performance looks very much like a drive failure.
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    A raid array that cant rebuild is near 100% worthless (outside of raid 0)
    - kstrauser 7y ago
      But if the reason it can't rebuild is that the drives are unfit for purpose, you can't really blame the controller.
      - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
        Which is why the manufacturer shouldn't have branded them as NAS drives!
packetlost 7y ago
Class action lawsuit in 3... 2... 1...
glitchc 7y ago
They suggest moving to Red Pros if performance is a concern, but it's not clear from the post if the Red Pros are also SMR-based platters. I have a couple of new ones (soon to be) integrated into a NAS. Anyone know if they are SMR or CMR?
- kstrauser 7y ago
  The problem is that they're believed to be CMR right now, but they could change that this afternoon and wouldn't tell you.
  - organsnyder 7y ago
    Yep. Given this response, I have no desire to buy any Western Digital product—of any type, for any purpose—ever again. They knowingly sold a drive that would obviously be inadequate for its advertised use-case. Who knows what other false advertising they might also be doing.
    - kstrauser 7y ago
      "We never said that it didn't have sandpaper on the heads! If you want a drive without sandpaper, consider upgrading to our Pro line."
  - donmcronald 7y ago
    "Perhaps your workload is more suited to our "WD Red Pro Elite Plus" lineup." Western Digital, circa 2025
  - glitchc 7y ago
    Thanks to all. That’s frankly terrifying. If it weren’t for COVID I would send them back post-haste.
prostanac 7y ago
In EU we have a conformity warranty which basically gives you the right to return the product (or demand a partial refund) if it does not meet the advertised specs. [1] Does it apply in this case? IANAL but my guess is that it should apply, as it meets two of the prerequisites: - are not fit for the specific purpose required by the consumer, of which he/she informed the seller at the moment of conclusion of the contract, and which the seller accepted; - are not fit for the usual purpose of goods of the same type; [1] https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/consumer-topics/buying-goods-services/guarantees-warranties/guarantees-warranties-in-france/legal-guarantee-of-conformity/ https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/consumer-topics/buyin...
- HelloNurse 7y ago
  If the product lies by design it's far beyond "not meeting specs".
- cfstras 7y ago
  I‘d guess that the german „Sachmangel“ would apply here. However, this law applies to the seller - so every dealer would have to start arguing with WD about getting their money back. Sachmangel does not apply to the same extent for business customers...
  - dvdgsng 7y ago
    IANAL but doesn't sachmangel require the seller to know about the drives being SMR when the purchase happens?
gigatexal 7y ago
I guess we are boycotting WD now or voting with our wallets saying how garbage a response this is. What’s a good alternative to WD reds?
- LeifCarrotson 7y ago
  Sadly, I've bought a lot of WD over the years. Seagate seems to be a minefield, HGST is owned by WD, leaving Toshiba as the only remaining option. Looks like the N300 is their line of NAS-optimized drives: https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/toshiba-internal-hard-drives-n300/ https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/toshiba-internal-ha... https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#m=111&t=5200,5400,5700,5760,5900,7200,10000,10025,10500,10520,15000&f=2&sort=ppgb&page=1 https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#m=111... They also have surveillance video storage drives and enterprise drives that might do well in the same applications.
  - 3131s 7y ago
    According to this, Toshiba has been doing the same thing... https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sneaky-marketing-toshiba-seagate-wd-smr-drives-without-disclosure https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sneaky-marketing-toshiba-s...
    - Tijdreiziger 7y ago
      But Toshiba did it on their desktop drives, instead of on NAS drives which you buy specifically for their reliability
mibmal 7y ago
Silly customers. It is your fault of course. Using NAS branded hard drives in common NAS configurations.
hedora 7y ago
They say they rigorously tested that the drives can handle 30 overwrites per year without going into a GC storm (180TB/6TB = 30) From those numbers, you won’t exceed the duty cycle as long as you throttle your raid rebuild to take 12 days, and don’t issue reads or writes during that time. More transparency is needed, whether or not the product is as bad as my back of the envelope calculation suggests. For example, what’s the maximum sustained 4kb random write iop rate for the drive? What’s the sustained sequential bandwidth?
- BLKNSLVR 7y ago
  > throttle your raid rebuild to take 12 days, and don’t issue reads or writes during that time So, 12 days of downtime for the NAS. Doesn't sound like a very NAS-specific product to me. That's 3.3% downtime in 12 months from a single HDD failure. 12 days of sweating on another HDD not failing during the rebuild process. Not fit for purpose.
justinclift 7y ago
> If you are encountering performance that is not what you expected, please consider ... our WD Red Pro or WD Gold drives, or perhaps an Ultrastar drive. So, they're saying the new low end WD Red drives are unfit for purpose. And boy do they have a solution just ready and waiting to go. Which presumably, uses the older CMR (eg normal) tech to do the same thing. They probably just rebadged the older drive models that work. ;)
ping_pong 7y ago
This is exactly one of those cases where the ambulance-chasing class action lawsuit lawyers are useful. I would eagerly join a class action lawsuit against ALL the drive manufacturers on this issue.
- mindslight 7y ago
  So, you get your check for $3.50 or a coupon for $20 off a new WD Red "NAS" drive from their web store. And then what? Most people bought multiple drives at a time, spending hundreds of dollars. This seems like a prime candidate for technology-assisted small claims court, for the full purchase price of the counterfeit drives.
  - fmajid 7y ago
    You do not need to get a non-trivial compensation for the threat of a class-action lawsuit to be a deterrent for behavior like this. It's the price the defendant pays that matters.
  - donmcronald 7y ago
    A coupon is a super bad deal because it doesn't punish the company. Trivial amounts of money are fine as long as it adds up to a huge number for the company involved. Think of it as more of a fine or a penalty to the company rather than getting your money back. Even if all the money goes to lawyers, it's still a better deal for consumers than getting nothing.
- gorbachev 7y ago
  European regulators usually have much more bite than class action suits. I'm hoping this will get their attention at some point.
jchw 7y ago
After reading this, my only question is, what do we do now? Western Digital already bought HGST and discontinued it. Maybe they felt safe enough to pull this because they know the alternate options are limited.
- AnonC 7y ago
  I thought it discontinued just the HGST brand name. HGST branded drives still seem to be available in the market (or some markets). Last year’s Backblaze hard drive reliability report also had some HGST drives near the top of the rankings.
Qantourisc 7y ago
For some reason I remember most HDD customers are more technical people. So I wonder how much this is going to cost them long term.
Springcleaning 7y ago
"WD Red HDDs have for many years reliably powered home and small business NAS systems" Yes, the non SMR ones." You are misleading the consumer and should have called it WD Pink, because the SMR drives are a totally different product. "If you have purchased a WD Red drive, please call our customer care if you are experiencing performance or any other technical issues. We will have options for you. We are here to help." Other than refunding or providing a replacement non-SMR drive without extra cost to the consumer are the only options.
tibbydudeza 7y ago
I just hate this rebranding ... Red vs Red "Pro". It used to be so simple Green - slow cheap, Blue - faster more pricey than green, Black - fastest more pricey than blue, Red - fast as Blue but pricey but good for NAS
detaro 7y ago
Has anyone seen a benchmark example of e.g. an array rebuild, and how large the difference is?
- mark-r 7y ago
  I think the issue is that with the bad drives, an array rebuild will never finish. One drive will degrade to the point where it simply stops responding.
  - detaro 7y ago
    I understood that to be mostly a problem with hardware controllers, those tend to be more picky? (someone I knew tried a hardware RAID of WD Greens back in the day, that also exploded regularly because of response times) I'd thought it would just slow down a lot when software tries continuous writing, and am curious how much that is. (ideally, this is something WD should publish, since they claim it's fine, but ...)
Netcob 7y ago
"We're sorry you bought your drives for the clearly advertised use. Shame about them being kicked out of your RAID - sounds like you should have paid a little more! May we interest you in some more expensive drives? Don't worry, you can keep the ones you bought as paperweights or door-stoppers."
chrisacky 7y ago
Is this why my Synology 4 bay, had had 8 WD reds in the last 4 years? I don't even use it much. It's just always powered on. Drives me insane that I have to pay 200gbp a year just to replace drives that supposed to last years.
organsnyder 7y ago
I will never purchase another Western Digital product unless they make a MAJOR about-face on this. Western Digital owns SanDisk, so that goes for them too.
Fej 7y ago
Who got the 3.5" part of HGST? Wikipedia says Toshiba, but WD is selling drives under the Ultrastar name, not Toshiba. I mean, where do you go for reliable storage at this point?
- hamstercat 7y ago
  HGST is owner by WD. They have operated independently for a while, unsure of the current state.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
The only thing I wanted them to say was: "These are the drives we currently sell which use SMR. When we use SMR in the future, we'll disclose it." Had they done this, the whole snafu would have actually made me more likely to buy WD drives than before! But they didn't do it. Oh well.
- jyrkesh 7y ago
  Same! And I still don't feel confident that the Red Pros are actually not SMR. Has any independent outlet confirmed that yet? Or am I stuck buying Toshiba next?
  - notRobot 7y ago
    Toshiba does the same thing too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      However, when asked, Toshiba was explicit about which models do and do not use SMR: https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/16/toshiba-desktop-disk-drives-undocumented-shingle-magnetic-recording/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/16/toshiba-desktop-disk-d...
arminiusreturns 7y ago
You just have to look at the BackBlaze hdd reports to know WD has been out of the game for a long time. What really upset me was when they bought HGST out in 2012, but fortunately that management doesn't seem to have impacted the HGST quality as much as I feared, but time will tell. Also, stop using raid 5 people. The risk of failure cascades given the build times on such large drives means it should be almost totally deprecated imho.
- lliamander 7y ago
  What should you use instead of RAID 5?
  - bentolor 6y ago
    ZRAID1 oder ZRAID2
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    RAID 6 (adds an extra parity disk) or generalized erasure coding (more flexible but not so easy to manage).
    - pessimizer 7y ago
      I still use RAID 5 for small 3/4-disk arrays; I think the odds are in my favor then. But if I need 4x disk size, I go to RAID 6 (so I jump from a 4-disk RAID 5 to a 6-disk RAID 6.)
    - aaronmdjones 7y ago
      Nitpick: RAID-5 and RAID-6 don't use "parity disks". They stripe the parity across every disk, just like RAID-0 stripes data, so you lose a disk worth of capacity (or two disks worth of capacity in RAID-6), but the parity is on every disk. Having a disk dedicated to parity would be an incredibly burdensome write bottleneck, which is exactly what RAID-4 is, and why you probably haven't heard of it.
  - magicalhippo 7y ago
skummetmaelk 7y ago
There really needs to be some kind of capital punishment for companies pushing bullshit like this and deliberately misleading customers. As a bonus we would also get rid of homeopathy and MLMs. EDIT: Not capital punishment for the people involved obviously, but the companies should be severely sanctioned. Possibly even closed. The involved management should be prohibited from holding management positions in the future for 10 years or more. Oh, and all bonuses paid out since the fraud started should be reclaimed with personal fines.
mbreese 7y ago
Meanwhile Seagate says unequivocally that SMR isn't useful for any NAS application... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seagate-says-network-attached-storage-and-smr-dont-mix/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seaga... Seagate does seem to think SMR is applicable for desktop use, however. But that's a fight for another day...
- fomine3 7y ago
  Reasonable response. WD did insane decision.
ryall 7y ago
Is anyone really surprised? HDD manufacturers have been misleading consumers since they all started advertising kilobytes as 1000 bytes
- ratsmack 7y ago
  This is the one thing that has rustled my jimmies every time I have had to deal with it. They could have easily had marketing jargon for the general consumer and then left the real specification number in generally accepted computing values. This is the kind of stuff that happens when marketing and accounting take over and start running the engineering departments.
- aaronmdjones 7y ago
  A kilobyte is 1000 bytes. A kibibyte is 1024 bytes. Windows measures in kibibytes but then says the result in kilobytes, making it look less than it is, i.e. if you connect a 1000 GB (931 GiB) drive to a Windows machine, it will tell you that it's 931 GB. It isn't. You're getting every byte you paid for. Other operating systems don't lie to you.
- acdha 7y ago
  It wasn’t just marketing. Historically, a kilobyte was 1024 bytes in memory contexts where everything was based on powers of two but nowhere else. This was obviously confusing because everywhere else used kilo as 1000 — a 420MB hard drive would have been measured in units of 1024 for capacity and 1000 for transfer speed. When the SI units were standardized in 1998, it helped drive manufacturers advertise larger numbers but it also rectified this accident of history where a standard prefix had been used with a non-standard definition in only one part of computing.
slipperyp 7y ago
As I'm WFH next to my Synology and look down at my ESD bag-wrapped spare WD Red, I can't help but be reminded of Peter Graves glancing down at his tray with a perfectly cleaned fishbone in "Airplane!"
vbezhenar 7y ago
So basically don't buy WD Red for RAID and buy WD Red Pro for any real NAS application. It's a way to silently raise prices, I guess.
- snvzz 7y ago
  wd red pro are 7200rpm. Power consumption and heat.
squarefoot 7y ago
Are those drives really safe for RAID-1 arrangements? I read somewhere they could not survive resyncs, so why RAID-1 wouldn't be affected, either after a resync or a faulty drive swap?
kasabali 7y ago
SMR is such a horrible backwards "technology", I wonder why vendors still push it aggressively on users after all these years. 1. Its performance is noticeably worse than CMR. 2. The density increase SMR provides compared to CMR is not that much. It's 25% at most. 3. SMR is not a separate evolutionary path that can be developed further to have increasingly more density compared to CMR. It is more like a variation of the same technology which provides slightly more density in exchange for serious disadvantages. SMR and CMR both directly depend on, and benefit from developments in platter densities. When a new, denser platter generation is introduced, CMR and SMR benefit from it same. 4. A huge portion of the drive must be reserved as a non-SMR cache area to mitigate the performance penalty SMR brings. Notice that this is an extra area that does not exist on a CMR drive so it reduces density increase SMR brings. 5. SMR drives have much larger DRAM cache to mitigate the performance penalty (64MB on a CMR drive vs 256MB on SMR drives), increasing the cost for that part. 6. Logic and mechanism of writes are much more complicated on a SMR drive than a CMR one. Drive is separated into different zones, data must be stored on a cache zone, then new data should be written into permanent zones in an optimal manner in background during idle time, managing different zones, cache area, rewrites, background tasks etc. all these makes the drive firmware much more complicated. Compared to a SSD firmware it is actually worse of both worlds: You're getting all the complexity of a SSD firmware with a worse performance than a regular hard drive. 7. What is even more worrying than those technical details are that vendors are sinking more and more resources and pushing very hard on technologically dead-end SMR technology. WD even wrote a PR piece called a "Zoned storage initiative" for trying to paint host managed SMR technology the future of storage and developed a linux filesystem called zonefs to back it up. 8. Despite all those shortcomings, they don't even sell SMR drives cheaper than CMR drives. TL;DR: SMR is a harmful technological "drug" HDD vendors use to buy at most few years of time in platter density but with a very serious side effects.
- donmcronald 7y ago
  I wonder if they have a bunch of binned trash and pushing it into the lower end consumer spaces is a way to get rid of it.
  - 7y ago
tuananh 7y ago
SMR explained: Be aware that this drive uses SMR technology (Shingled Magnetic Recording) to achieve such high density in a small package. If you don't know what that is, think of how shingles on a roof are laid out partially overlapping each other - that is how the data is laid out on the drive platters. While this allows significantly higher capacities, it creates some complexity to writing. If the drive needs to write data in the middle of existing data, it can't just "place" it there like a HDD using PMR technology because other data also overlaps it. What it has to do is put the data in a temporary location, then re-write all the shingled data afterwards to the end of the track break.
Rafuino 7y ago
This HDD is dead anyway
CapriciousCptl 7y ago
I had no idea why my lightly used NAS RAID array with 2 NAS-rated WD drives was failing every few months. Now I know why. Last year, I was researching a small hedge fund and found they had a heavy WD position, they cited metrics like $/gb and called WD a cost-leader. Now I know why.
floatingatoll 7y ago
Something I don’t understand - why does the drive slowing down cause a rebuild to abort?
- imtringued 7y ago
  Imagine your garbage collector runs for 30 seconds. It will cause timeouts.
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
    Ah, so various RAID systems hard-code a timeout that’s too short for shingled drives?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
boulos 7y ago
This is a pretty awful "I'm sorry you feel that way" response. Also, thanks to HN for highlighting this misleading setup in the first place (I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise). I happen to have replaced a failed drive in my NAS box with one of these. I just checked the logs for the rebuild time and while my array has 8T, I'm only using 3.3T so it had to rebuild about 800 GB (this is Linux software raid on an older 4-bay synology diskstation). It took about 7 hours end to end, which while not amazing, is still ~30MB/second. To be clear, this was on a Saturday night, and I don't use my NAS box for plex serving or anything (nor do I use ZFS, so I totally understand the rage of folks with random I/O rebuilds that have been screwed by this). Is everyone else assuming a rebuild of a very active NAS box? To reiterate, I still disagree with WD on this, but I'm not holding my breath for a $5 after-laywers-fees class-action settlement check :).
Lightbody 7y ago
Oh wonderful. I have 4x12TB RED disks in my Synology. I wasn't aware of this at all until seeing this post. Guess I'll be looking to slowly replace them before they go belly-up. Unfortunately, it seems with each swap out I risk the very problem this is all about.
- snvzz 7y ago
  Fortunately, it's not used on 8TB+ disks yet, so you're safe. The problem will be getting replacements for these, as it's not safe to just buy HDDs anymore.
sqldba 7y ago
Jesus what a pile of drivel. Zero commitment to addressing the misleading advertising or making amends.
PeterStuer 7y ago
Has WD also bamboozeled NAS Raid enclosure sellers such as Synology? If you go into their compqtibility lists you will find the WD Red with SMR (the WDxxxEFAX series) listed as compatible, but with a specific reference to their SMR KB page which just warns not to mix SMR and PMR drives in the same raid volume. https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/PMR_SMR_hard_disk_drives https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutoria...
- onli 7y ago
  > bamboozeled Defrauded is the word you were searching.

313 points by hysan 7y ago

Western Digital has updated the blog post after this HN post went up and listed the technology used by their different hard drives in an update at the top of the post. All the backlash seems to have worked.

ubercow13 7y ago

>Having built this reputation, we understand that, at times, our drives may be used in system workloads far exceeding their intended uses. A use case which seems to cause failure is inserting a drive into a RAID array. These drives are advertised as being for use in RAID arrays.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
I’m wondering if we’re living on the same planet as these people. They literally put NAS in the name of the drive?? Does NAS drive arrays exist outside of a RAID? Is there such a thing in consumer, prosumer, or professional setups?
- wl 7y ago
  Single-drive NAS exists. Apple's now-discontinued Time Capsule is probably the most famous example.
  - guitarbill 7y ago
    That true, but isn't exactly the most common use-case, though, or what most people would assume. WD's actions are still inexcusable, especially because the non-SMR and SMR models cost pretty much the same. No savings being passed on to us. Pure greed.
- Macha 7y ago
  There's plenty of cheap drives sold as NAS drives which have no RAID, or enclosures which default to JBOD, so their suggestion seems to be that the standard Red drives are now only suitable for "Build your own MyBook" use.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  Yes. Take a look at UnRaid. It’s essentially a drive array with some number of parity drives (like a RAID), but no striping of files across drives.
- ubercow13 7y ago
  Yep, though they are actually advertised as being for RAID, not just NAS (though NAS is in the name)
- syshum 7y ago
  THis is in NO WAY a defense of WD, just an awnser to the question "Does NAS drive arrays exist outside of a RAID?" RAID has several levels.. Any RAID that uses Parity will have a problem with SMR, but Mirror and Striped array probally will not A common use case is a 2 Disk Mirror NAS for SMB. Further NAS manufactures like QNap, and even WD do make single disk NAS Appliances However the WD Red line is branded for NAS upto 8 drives, Most likly that will be a RAID5 or 6 array making SMR not usable in that configuration
  - prirun 7y ago
    My understanding is that SMR drives fail because the write load is continuous for a long period of time and overwhelms the background process organizing the data for efficient SMR writes. In a 2-disk mirror (RAID1) rebuild, all data from one drive has to be copied to the other drive, which seems likely to overwhelm an SMR drive. So it would seem to only work in a RAID0 array (concatenated drives - bad idea) or JBOD NAS setup.

tw04 7y ago

"We've rigorously tested up to 8 drives" - bullshit. An 8-bay synology will fail a RAID rebuild every single time. If you're lucky, it'll work after the 3rd retry - which will be about 2 weeks later because of how slow it is. This is a money grab, plain and simple. Had they substituted SMR drives at a lower price they might have a leg to stand on. But as others have mentioned, they didn't - they lied until they got caught and are now pretending like they were up-front. Talk about making a bad situation worse. The headline should've been "We're sorry, here's what we're doing to fix it" - instead it's "there's nothing wrong, it's YOUR fault you caught me cheating".

sixothree 7y ago
I think the worst part of this fiasco is that the drives may appear to operate normally until the moment when the raid is most vulnerable.
rodgerd 7y ago
I wonder if this explains why a a couple of brand new Red drives have brought down an 8-drive ZFS array for me. Oh, well. i'll return them and keep returning them until they work right.
imtringued 7y ago
Companies pretending that nothing is wrong are the worst.

reacharavindh 7y ago

This is making a bad situation , adding oil to it, and lighting it on fire hoping that the problem will go away unnoticed. I have a lot of WD(HGST) (more than 2 PB) in service as of now. I will never buy anything WD until they come clean on shit like this. They should talk to VW about Karma and how it bites your behind.

tyingq 7y ago

This is probably an archival worthy example of corporate PR speak/spin around "we got caught". SMR is pretty clearly not the use case for what they branded "RED" for. Wishing them a VW level wave of karma.

xattt 7y ago
They’re also upselling their Red Pro and Gold lines. Sleazy.
- wegs 7y ago
  I read that as 'for critical applications, buy a competitor's drive.' Perhaps reading comprehension is limited on my part. The key thing I want from a drive is reliability. I don't want to lose my data. That far beats size, noise, speed, cost, or just about anything else in what I will shop on. A drive that loses data will cost my thousands of dollars. My perception of reliability comes down to trust and transparency.If I can't trust a drive maker, I won't buy from them. WD just went into my don't-trust don't-buy pile. I actually don't have any non-critical applications. If my mom's laptop hard drive fails, that's still thousands of dollars of my time helping her. It's no less important than enterprise (indeed, I'd argue more, since she doesn't have RAID).
  - StillBored 6y ago
    Yah, so they have come somewhat clean about SMR, but they have a lot of other bits they have been hiding. Some of it in plain sight. "5400 RPM class" which means what exactly? And of course the whole desktop vs nas differentiation was the early return on error logic being hard coded instead of configurable by the OS/RAID. Remove a feature charge more..
  - glitchc 7y ago
    WD bought out Hitachi's storage business in 2012, so those Ultrastars are still their own, albeit different branding.
    - 7y ago

PaulHoule 7y ago

When is the last time you contacted customer care and got useful advice for a product such as hard drives. I am wary of so many differentiated products out there. Just in case I want to save 5 cents on an SSD so I can get a 50x increase of 95% latency. Reliability is most important and the way you get there is volume. I'd rather see a good drive that is made in large numbers rather than 100 SOUs that can never really be tested.

maccard 7y ago
I've been having issues with what I suspect is a faulty powerline adapter from TP-Link. I spent over an hour on the phone to them, factory resetting, for them to decide my issue was solved because the status lights were functioning correctly when I moved both adapters to the same extension lead. There was no option to escalate, continue troubleshooting, nothing. I went back to the Netgear ones I was trying to "upgrade" from.
ethbro 7y ago
Ah, customer support, the /dev/null of technical complaints.
- PaulHoule 7y ago
  I dunno. Often they are good at giving you an RMA for a failed drive.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    Point. So a black hole with an occasional lever for replacement.
    - PaulHoule 7y ago
      What else can they do at scale? A hard drive or SSD is a complex device. Are you going to expect the customer service people help you dump the firmware out that JTAG port? People like that can be trained and equipped with simple diagnostics and remedy options, they can't be expected to get into the fine details of product selection.

dsr_ 7y ago

TL;DR: We know we were concealing a material fact from our customers. Please don't sue us.

gwerbret 7y ago
...except that they didn't say "please".

wronglebowski 7y ago

It seems quite unfortunate we’re coming up the other side of the U shaped price graph for HDD technology. From collusion between the three manufacturers and a consistent push towards flash it’s unlikely we’ll see any further reductions in price per GB without major performance hits like SMR. This wouldn’t be a problem if flash were cheap enough in the volumes required for archival level storage, but it isn’t. Flash storage is actually going up this year as demand continues to increase. I suspect there’s no ready answer for those that hoard data now or in the future.

core-questions 7y ago
You sure about that? I remember reading comments like this when drives seemed to be "stuck" in the 300gb range, and again when 1-2tb was about as big as you could get for a while. Now we have 16TB drives; so is there really some issue for those who want to hoard? Honestly, how big is your personal hoard anyway if a few 16TB drives won't cover it? Isn't it the case that at some point you will have amassed more media than you could possibly consume?
- wronglebowski 7y ago
  In my opinion from the previous price fixing scandals and no real competition between the few major suppliers there's very little driving innovation in this space. Perhaps the major suppliers will get better deals or bigger drives but there's no reason for the players in the market to make a product consumers can buy more appealing. We're such a small part of the market and have such little choice.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  "640K ought to be enough for anyone." - Unknown It's likely that 16TB won't keep up with further technological advances.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  bluray quality video is about 13GB/hr for 1080p or 33GB/hr for 4K. it's cost prohibitive for people to accumulate a huge amount of this content legally, but torrents are still a thing. it adds up really fast if you aren't willing to prune your collection. there isn't currently a ton of 4K content available, but there's lots of 1080p. if you rip/download enough bluray 1080p to watch an hour every night, that's almost 5TB per year right there. if there were enough 4K content to support your habit, it would be more than 12TB a year.

Causality1 7y ago

WD is far too large a company to have a soul so there is zero chance they're actually sorry.

ratsmack 7y ago
It has nothing to do with a soul... it's just the nature of large business to revolve around marketing and accounting to maximize profits, while disregarding sound engineering.

hlandau 7y ago

>SMR is tested and proven technology that enables us to keep up with the growing volume of data for personal and business use. Absolute baloney. SMR is useful if it allows you to attain capacities otherwise unattainable, which isn't the case here. Note that the higher capacity Red drives don't use SMR. Older Red drives of these capacities, and non-Red drives of these capacities, don't use SMR. Also, notice how now they're openly admitting that these are SMR drives. Nowhere in this post do they admit that they previously deliberately concealed this fact. EDIT: Also note that they talk about these being "drive-managed SMR" drives, and they are, but they reportedly don't advertise themselves to the OS as being drive-managed SMR, as they're supposed to do as per the ATA specifications (unlike other WD DMSMR drives which do). They literally designed the drives themselves to lie about this. >Additionally, some of you have recently shared that in certain, more data intensive, continuous read/write use cases, the WD Red HDD-powered NAS systems are not performing as you would expect. They literally built a NAS drive which can't handle RAID, and are acting like this isn't their failing.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ac29 7y ago
> Also note that they talk about these being "drive-managed SMR" drives, and they are, but they reportedly don't advertise themselves to the OS as being drive-managed SMR, as they're supposed to do as per the ATA specifications (unlike other WD DMSMR drives which do). They literally designed the drives themselves to lie about this. I wonder if reporting to the OS that it is a SMR drive would kick in host-managing SMR code paths that conflict with how the drive managed SMR works. While I'm not terribly inclined to give WD the benefit of the doubt, this seems certainly possible. It seems like it should be possible to test by modifying whatever part of the Linux kernel or userspace tools control this and having it use the model number instead of what the drive reports as its SMR status. Granted on a closed device like a Synology NAS, this isnt possible for a user to do though Synology themselves could, and probably should test this.
- kalleboo 7y ago

bthrn 7y ago

> If you are encountering performance that is not what you expected, please consider our products designed for intensive workloads. It seems very strange to argue that customers should just know beforehand what they need, while also at the same time acknowledging the hiding (or at the very least, omission) of the information customers need in order to make that decision.

kstrauser 7y ago
Yeah, that's terrible advice. They advertise these as high-end prosumer drives. To the product manager at WD who is inevitably reading this: if your hardware doesn't live up to your own marketing, I'm not going to throw more money your way. I'm switching to your competition.
- magduf 7y ago
  The WD product manager's response: "Bwahahaha!!! Seagate's drives are crap too, and we own Hitachi! Where are you going to go now? Bwahahahaha!"
  - kstrauser 7y ago
    My reply: I'll take my chances with ${not_wd}. At least they can survive a rebuild, so if a drive dies early I can replace it with something else.
  - Tijdreiziger 7y ago
    Toshiba's still around
  - imtringued 7y ago
    We can always stop buying HDDs.
    - magduf 7y ago
      I've read that SSDs can't be used to replace HDDs for long-term archival use: if you leave them powered off for too long, the data degrades. I can store data long-term on a regular HDD and stick in a closet or safe-deposit box and then get it out after a few years, plug it in, and read it just fine.

d4rti 7y ago

Is there a list of known not SMR WD RED drive model numbers? I have 4TB REDs in my Synology but they are a few years old; is there a way I can find out?

moviuro 7y ago
> the EFRX is the faster CMR drive, and the EFAX is the much slower SMR drive. From https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-disks-are-being-submarined-into-unexpected-channels/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...
DavidVoid 7y ago
Here is a list of known SMR drives [1]. The newer WD##EFAX ones are SMR but if your drive is a few years old then it's probably a WD40EFRX which is NOT a SMR drive. [1] https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/list-of-known-smr-drives.141/ https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/list-of-known-...
- d4rti 7y ago
  Thanks, it's the EFRX.
- phire 7y ago
  Except only the EFAX drives with 6TB or less capacity. The 8TB and larger drives use the exact same WD##EFAX model number, but aren't SMR.
- nonninz 7y ago
  Looks like my RAID NAS at home is safe (from this at least) then. Thank you :)
Silhouette 7y ago
Based on the reports a week or so ago: Earlier models (WDx0EFRX) were not SMR. Newer ones (WDx0EFAX) are, up to 6TB.
spartas 7y ago

mjs33 7y ago

Did the text get cut off? All I read was some corporate PR nonsense, did I miss the real content? Never buying WD drives again!

shawnz 7y ago
Agreed, it would have been better if they posted nothing.

j45 7y ago

As an owner of Red drives, it’s surprising WD would trot out a new acronym for in device features to a group already literate in acronyms. It just makes me wonder how easily they believe their customer base can be placated. Had I known I was not receiving what I thought I had purchased, I would have likely purchased a different drive. The least WD could do is unilaterally extend the warranty of these misrepresented drives to easily deal with any fears, if they really believe in their products as such. It will be interesting to see if the MTTB on these drives is in a smaller spectrum of time.

spartas 7y ago
Extending the warranties on SMR drives does _nothing_ to solve the performance issues. The drives were marketed for use in NAS RAID systems, but the abysmal performance (due to the drives' SMR) in many cases will cause the NAS or RAID system to kick out the drive as a bad drive. Given that RAID rebuild times are increasing as the size of the drives are increasing, and SMR exacerbates the longer rebuild times, these drives should not be used in the NAS or RAID systems for which that they were marketed. By obfuscating the use of SMR in their WD Red line, WD willfully and intentionally harmed their customers.
- j45 7y ago
  I agree that it was completely misleading and that extending warranties solves nothing SMR related specifically for performance. An advance ship program to swap drives with SMR is what should happen.

Sholmesy 7y ago

Wow, this is a horrendously bad response, no apology, no admission of guilt, probably written by the legal team. I am a total layman w.r.t Hard Drives, but it seems pretty simple (please correct me if I'm wrong): - They used a technology that impacts performance, that allows them to make higher capacity drives for cheaper. - The technology used prohibits them from being used in certain application context (citation needed/general consensus?) - They marketed the product as being suitable for those certain application contexts, when they aren't. - They come out with a blog, telling consumers to buy their more expensive drives instead?

hlandau 7y ago
This is pretty much correct, yes.
cma 7y ago
> no omission of guilt Freudian slip?
- Sholmesy 7y ago
  Ha, fixed. Thanks
sixothree 7y ago
> They used a technology that impacts performance I feel like this is an understatement. In certain scenarios for which they were designed, because of this performance issue, they fail to work at all. Maybe that is covered by the following points but I feel like "stops responding" and "impacts performance" are very different things.
JeremyNT 7y ago
So it seems like ultimately, what they've done is to move what used to be "Red" into "Red Pro" and make "Red" a more budget oriented line (without clearly communicating this in advance). The only reason to do this is to trick customers into buying the wrong product by accident! There is literally no good faith reading of this change. If they wanted to provide better value for the people who don't mind the SMR performance characteristics, that's great, but that would involve clearly marketing the line as such, not simply redefining what "WD Red" means.

jrockway 7y ago

I didn't have any background on this and didn't know what SMR was. Apparently the background is: people try to add these things to RAID arrays, and when they do some rebalancing, the RAID software rejects the disk. The reason is because they use "SMR", which severely hurts random-write performance. The controversy is that it's pretty shady to sell a drive as a "NAS Drive" when the drive is too slow to be usable with any RAID software. (I will spare you my rant on how bad RAID software is. But this is yet another interesting edge case that RAID software doesn't handle and reacts by just blowing away your data.)

Majromax 7y ago
> The reason is because they use "SMR", which severely hurts random-write performance. It hurts random-write performance after a threshold, when an on-disk staging area becomes exhausted. For short bursts, the drive behaves well -- it probably would legitimately work in a RAID array if the array were initialized from a clean slate and not rebuilt. > But this is yet another interesting edge case that RAID software doesn't handle and reacts by just blowing away your data. It's not obvious how a RAID controller should "handle" this. The drives have no outward indication that they suffer from random write saturation. From the controller's perspective, the degraded performance looks very much like a drive failure.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  A raid array that cant rebuild is near 100% worthless (outside of raid 0)
  - kstrauser 7y ago
    But if the reason it can't rebuild is that the drives are unfit for purpose, you can't really blame the controller.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Which is why the manufacturer shouldn't have branded them as NAS drives!

packetlost 7y ago

Class action lawsuit in 3... 2... 1...

glitchc 7y ago

They suggest moving to Red Pros if performance is a concern, but it's not clear from the post if the Red Pros are also SMR-based platters. I have a couple of new ones (soon to be) integrated into a NAS. Anyone know if they are SMR or CMR?

kstrauser 7y ago
The problem is that they're believed to be CMR right now, but they could change that this afternoon and wouldn't tell you.
- organsnyder 7y ago
  Yep. Given this response, I have no desire to buy any Western Digital product—of any type, for any purpose—ever again. They knowingly sold a drive that would obviously be inadequate for its advertised use-case. Who knows what other false advertising they might also be doing.
  - kstrauser 7y ago
    "We never said that it didn't have sandpaper on the heads! If you want a drive without sandpaper, consider upgrading to our Pro line."
- donmcronald 7y ago
  "Perhaps your workload is more suited to our "WD Red Pro Elite Plus" lineup." Western Digital, circa 2025
- glitchc 7y ago
  Thanks to all. That’s frankly terrifying. If it weren’t for COVID I would send them back post-haste.

prostanac 7y ago

In EU we have a conformity warranty which basically gives you the right to return the product (or demand a partial refund) if it does not meet the advertised specs. [1] Does it apply in this case? IANAL but my guess is that it should apply, as it meets two of the prerequisites: - are not fit for the specific purpose required by the consumer, of which he/she informed the seller at the moment of conclusion of the contract, and which the seller accepted; - are not fit for the usual purpose of goods of the same type; [1] https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/consumer-topics/buying-goods-services/guarantees-warranties/guarantees-warranties-in-france/legal-guarantee-of-conformity/ https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/consumer-topics/buyin...

HelloNurse 7y ago
If the product lies by design it's far beyond "not meeting specs".
cfstras 7y ago
I‘d guess that the german „Sachmangel“ would apply here. However, this law applies to the seller - so every dealer would have to start arguing with WD about getting their money back. Sachmangel does not apply to the same extent for business customers...
- dvdgsng 7y ago
  IANAL but doesn't sachmangel require the seller to know about the drives being SMR when the purchase happens?

gigatexal 7y ago

I guess we are boycotting WD now or voting with our wallets saying how garbage a response this is. What’s a good alternative to WD reds?

LeifCarrotson 7y ago
Sadly, I've bought a lot of WD over the years. Seagate seems to be a minefield, HGST is owned by WD, leaving Toshiba as the only remaining option. Looks like the N300 is their line of NAS-optimized drives: https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/toshiba-internal-hard-drives-n300/ https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/toshiba-internal-ha... https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#m=111&t=5200,5400,5700,5760,5900,7200,10000,10025,10500,10520,15000&f=2&sort=ppgb&page=1 https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#m=111... They also have surveillance video storage drives and enterprise drives that might do well in the same applications.
- 3131s 7y ago
  According to this, Toshiba has been doing the same thing... https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sneaky-marketing-toshiba-seagate-wd-smr-drives-without-disclosure https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sneaky-marketing-toshiba-s...
  - Tijdreiziger 7y ago
    But Toshiba did it on their desktop drives, instead of on NAS drives which you buy specifically for their reliability

mibmal 7y ago

Silly customers. It is your fault of course. Using NAS branded hard drives in common NAS configurations.

hedora 7y ago

They say they rigorously tested that the drives can handle 30 overwrites per year without going into a GC storm (180TB/6TB = 30) From those numbers, you won’t exceed the duty cycle as long as you throttle your raid rebuild to take 12 days, and don’t issue reads or writes during that time. More transparency is needed, whether or not the product is as bad as my back of the envelope calculation suggests. For example, what’s the maximum sustained 4kb random write iop rate for the drive? What’s the sustained sequential bandwidth?

BLKNSLVR 7y ago
> throttle your raid rebuild to take 12 days, and don’t issue reads or writes during that time So, 12 days of downtime for the NAS. Doesn't sound like a very NAS-specific product to me. That's 3.3% downtime in 12 months from a single HDD failure. 12 days of sweating on another HDD not failing during the rebuild process. Not fit for purpose.

justinclift 7y ago

> If you are encountering performance that is not what you expected, please consider ... our WD Red Pro or WD Gold drives, or perhaps an Ultrastar drive. So, they're saying the new low end WD Red drives are unfit for purpose. And boy do they have a solution just ready and waiting to go. Which presumably, uses the older CMR (eg normal) tech to do the same thing. They probably just rebadged the older drive models that work. ;)

ping_pong 7y ago

This is exactly one of those cases where the ambulance-chasing class action lawsuit lawyers are useful. I would eagerly join a class action lawsuit against ALL the drive manufacturers on this issue.

mindslight 7y ago
So, you get your check for $3.50 or a coupon for $20 off a new WD Red "NAS" drive from their web store. And then what? Most people bought multiple drives at a time, spending hundreds of dollars. This seems like a prime candidate for technology-assisted small claims court, for the full purchase price of the counterfeit drives.
- fmajid 7y ago
  You do not need to get a non-trivial compensation for the threat of a class-action lawsuit to be a deterrent for behavior like this. It's the price the defendant pays that matters.
- donmcronald 7y ago
  A coupon is a super bad deal because it doesn't punish the company. Trivial amounts of money are fine as long as it adds up to a huge number for the company involved. Think of it as more of a fine or a penalty to the company rather than getting your money back. Even if all the money goes to lawyers, it's still a better deal for consumers than getting nothing.
gorbachev 7y ago
European regulators usually have much more bite than class action suits. I'm hoping this will get their attention at some point.

jchw 7y ago

After reading this, my only question is, what do we do now? Western Digital already bought HGST and discontinued it. Maybe they felt safe enough to pull this because they know the alternate options are limited.

AnonC 7y ago
I thought it discontinued just the HGST brand name. HGST branded drives still seem to be available in the market (or some markets). Last year’s Backblaze hard drive reliability report also had some HGST drives near the top of the rankings.

Qantourisc 7y ago

For some reason I remember most HDD customers are more technical people. So I wonder how much this is going to cost them long term.

Springcleaning 7y ago

"WD Red HDDs have for many years reliably powered home and small business NAS systems" Yes, the non SMR ones." You are misleading the consumer and should have called it WD Pink, because the SMR drives are a totally different product. "If you have purchased a WD Red drive, please call our customer care if you are experiencing performance or any other technical issues. We will have options for you. We are here to help." Other than refunding or providing a replacement non-SMR drive without extra cost to the consumer are the only options.

tibbydudeza 7y ago

I just hate this rebranding ... Red vs Red "Pro". It used to be so simple Green - slow cheap, Blue - faster more pricey than green, Black - fastest more pricey than blue, Red - fast as Blue but pricey but good for NAS

detaro 7y ago

Has anyone seen a benchmark example of e.g. an array rebuild, and how large the difference is?

mark-r 7y ago
I think the issue is that with the bad drives, an array rebuild will never finish. One drive will degrade to the point where it simply stops responding.
- detaro 7y ago
  I understood that to be mostly a problem with hardware controllers, those tend to be more picky? (someone I knew tried a hardware RAID of WD Greens back in the day, that also exploded regularly because of response times) I'd thought it would just slow down a lot when software tries continuous writing, and am curious how much that is. (ideally, this is something WD should publish, since they claim it's fine, but ...)

Netcob 7y ago

"We're sorry you bought your drives for the clearly advertised use. Shame about them being kicked out of your RAID - sounds like you should have paid a little more! May we interest you in some more expensive drives? Don't worry, you can keep the ones you bought as paperweights or door-stoppers."

chrisacky 7y ago

Is this why my Synology 4 bay, had had 8 WD reds in the last 4 years? I don't even use it much. It's just always powered on. Drives me insane that I have to pay 200gbp a year just to replace drives that supposed to last years.

organsnyder 7y ago

I will never purchase another Western Digital product unless they make a MAJOR about-face on this. Western Digital owns SanDisk, so that goes for them too.

Fej 7y ago

Who got the 3.5" part of HGST? Wikipedia says Toshiba, but WD is selling drives under the Ultrastar name, not Toshiba. I mean, where do you go for reliable storage at this point?

hamstercat 7y ago
HGST is owner by WD. They have operated independently for a while, unsure of the current state.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

The only thing I wanted them to say was: "These are the drives we currently sell which use SMR. When we use SMR in the future, we'll disclose it." Had they done this, the whole snafu would have actually made me more likely to buy WD drives than before! But they didn't do it. Oh well.

jyrkesh 7y ago
Same! And I still don't feel confident that the Red Pros are actually not SMR. Has any independent outlet confirmed that yet? Or am I stuck buying Toshiba next?
- notRobot 7y ago
  Toshiba does the same thing too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    However, when asked, Toshiba was explicit about which models do and do not use SMR: https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/16/toshiba-desktop-disk-drives-undocumented-shingle-magnetic-recording/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/16/toshiba-desktop-disk-d...

arminiusreturns 7y ago

You just have to look at the BackBlaze hdd reports to know WD has been out of the game for a long time. What really upset me was when they bought HGST out in 2012, but fortunately that management doesn't seem to have impacted the HGST quality as much as I feared, but time will tell. Also, stop using raid 5 people. The risk of failure cascades given the build times on such large drives means it should be almost totally deprecated imho.

lliamander 7y ago
What should you use instead of RAID 5?
- bentolor 6y ago
  ZRAID1 oder ZRAID2
- zozbot234 7y ago
  RAID 6 (adds an extra parity disk) or generalized erasure coding (more flexible but not so easy to manage).
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    I still use RAID 5 for small 3/4-disk arrays; I think the odds are in my favor then. But if I need 4x disk size, I go to RAID 6 (so I jump from a 4-disk RAID 5 to a 6-disk RAID 6.)
  - aaronmdjones 7y ago
    Nitpick: RAID-5 and RAID-6 don't use "parity disks". They stripe the parity across every disk, just like RAID-0 stripes data, so you lose a disk worth of capacity (or two disks worth of capacity in RAID-6), but the parity is on every disk. Having a disk dedicated to parity would be an incredibly burdensome write bottleneck, which is exactly what RAID-4 is, and why you probably haven't heard of it.
- magicalhippo 7y ago

skummetmaelk 7y ago

There really needs to be some kind of capital punishment for companies pushing bullshit like this and deliberately misleading customers. As a bonus we would also get rid of homeopathy and MLMs. EDIT: Not capital punishment for the people involved obviously, but the companies should be severely sanctioned. Possibly even closed. The involved management should be prohibited from holding management positions in the future for 10 years or more. Oh, and all bonuses paid out since the fraud started should be reclaimed with personal fines.

mbreese 7y ago

Meanwhile Seagate says unequivocally that SMR isn't useful for any NAS application... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seagate-says-network-attached-storage-and-smr-dont-mix/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seaga... Seagate does seem to think SMR is applicable for desktop use, however. But that's a fight for another day...

fomine3 7y ago
Reasonable response. WD did insane decision.

ryall 7y ago

Is anyone really surprised? HDD manufacturers have been misleading consumers since they all started advertising kilobytes as 1000 bytes

ratsmack 7y ago
This is the one thing that has rustled my jimmies every time I have had to deal with it. They could have easily had marketing jargon for the general consumer and then left the real specification number in generally accepted computing values. This is the kind of stuff that happens when marketing and accounting take over and start running the engineering departments.
aaronmdjones 7y ago
A kilobyte is 1000 bytes. A kibibyte is 1024 bytes. Windows measures in kibibytes but then says the result in kilobytes, making it look less than it is, i.e. if you connect a 1000 GB (931 GiB) drive to a Windows machine, it will tell you that it's 931 GB. It isn't. You're getting every byte you paid for. Other operating systems don't lie to you.
acdha 7y ago
It wasn’t just marketing. Historically, a kilobyte was 1024 bytes in memory contexts where everything was based on powers of two but nowhere else. This was obviously confusing because everywhere else used kilo as 1000 — a 420MB hard drive would have been measured in units of 1024 for capacity and 1000 for transfer speed. When the SI units were standardized in 1998, it helped drive manufacturers advertise larger numbers but it also rectified this accident of history where a standard prefix had been used with a non-standard definition in only one part of computing.

slipperyp 7y ago

As I'm WFH next to my Synology and look down at my ESD bag-wrapped spare WD Red, I can't help but be reminded of Peter Graves glancing down at his tray with a perfectly cleaned fishbone in "Airplane!"

vbezhenar 7y ago

So basically don't buy WD Red for RAID and buy WD Red Pro for any real NAS application. It's a way to silently raise prices, I guess.

snvzz 7y ago
wd red pro are 7200rpm. Power consumption and heat.

squarefoot 7y ago

Are those drives really safe for RAID-1 arrangements? I read somewhere they could not survive resyncs, so why RAID-1 wouldn't be affected, either after a resync or a faulty drive swap?

kasabali 7y ago

SMR is such a horrible backwards "technology", I wonder why vendors still push it aggressively on users after all these years. 1. Its performance is noticeably worse than CMR. 2. The density increase SMR provides compared to CMR is not that much. It's 25% at most. 3. SMR is not a separate evolutionary path that can be developed further to have increasingly more density compared to CMR. It is more like a variation of the same technology which provides slightly more density in exchange for serious disadvantages. SMR and CMR both directly depend on, and benefit from developments in platter densities. When a new, denser platter generation is introduced, CMR and SMR benefit from it same. 4. A huge portion of the drive must be reserved as a non-SMR cache area to mitigate the performance penalty SMR brings. Notice that this is an extra area that does not exist on a CMR drive so it reduces density increase SMR brings. 5. SMR drives have much larger DRAM cache to mitigate the performance penalty (64MB on a CMR drive vs 256MB on SMR drives), increasing the cost for that part. 6. Logic and mechanism of writes are much more complicated on a SMR drive than a CMR one. Drive is separated into different zones, data must be stored on a cache zone, then new data should be written into permanent zones in an optimal manner in background during idle time, managing different zones, cache area, rewrites, background tasks etc. all these makes the drive firmware much more complicated. Compared to a SSD firmware it is actually worse of both worlds: You're getting all the complexity of a SSD firmware with a worse performance than a regular hard drive. 7. What is even more worrying than those technical details are that vendors are sinking more and more resources and pushing very hard on technologically dead-end SMR technology. WD even wrote a PR piece called a "Zoned storage initiative" for trying to paint host managed SMR technology the future of storage and developed a linux filesystem called zonefs to back it up. 8. Despite all those shortcomings, they don't even sell SMR drives cheaper than CMR drives. TL;DR: SMR is a harmful technological "drug" HDD vendors use to buy at most few years of time in platter density but with a very serious side effects.

donmcronald 7y ago
I wonder if they have a bunch of binned trash and pushing it into the lower end consumer spaces is a way to get rid of it.
- 7y ago

tuananh 7y ago

SMR explained: Be aware that this drive uses SMR technology (Shingled Magnetic Recording) to achieve such high density in a small package. If you don't know what that is, think of how shingles on a roof are laid out partially overlapping each other - that is how the data is laid out on the drive platters. While this allows significantly higher capacities, it creates some complexity to writing. If the drive needs to write data in the middle of existing data, it can't just "place" it there like a HDD using PMR technology because other data also overlaps it. What it has to do is put the data in a temporary location, then re-write all the shingled data afterwards to the end of the track break.

Rafuino 7y ago

This HDD is dead anyway

CapriciousCptl 7y ago

I had no idea why my lightly used NAS RAID array with 2 NAS-rated WD drives was failing every few months. Now I know why. Last year, I was researching a small hedge fund and found they had a heavy WD position, they cited metrics like $/gb and called WD a cost-leader. Now I know why.

floatingatoll 7y ago

Something I don’t understand - why does the drive slowing down cause a rebuild to abort?

imtringued 7y ago
Imagine your garbage collector runs for 30 seconds. It will cause timeouts.
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  Ah, so various RAID systems hard-code a timeout that’s too short for shingled drives?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

boulos 7y ago

This is a pretty awful "I'm sorry you feel that way" response. Also, thanks to HN for highlighting this misleading setup in the first place (I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise). I happen to have replaced a failed drive in my NAS box with one of these. I just checked the logs for the rebuild time and while my array has 8T, I'm only using 3.3T so it had to rebuild about 800 GB (this is Linux software raid on an older 4-bay synology diskstation). It took about 7 hours end to end, which while not amazing, is still ~30MB/second. To be clear, this was on a Saturday night, and I don't use my NAS box for plex serving or anything (nor do I use ZFS, so I totally understand the rage of folks with random I/O rebuilds that have been screwed by this). Is everyone else assuming a rebuild of a very active NAS box? To reiterate, I still disagree with WD on this, but I'm not holding my breath for a $5 after-laywers-fees class-action settlement check :).

Lightbody 7y ago

Oh wonderful. I have 4x12TB RED disks in my Synology. I wasn't aware of this at all until seeing this post. Guess I'll be looking to slowly replace them before they go belly-up. Unfortunately, it seems with each swap out I risk the very problem this is all about.

snvzz 7y ago
Fortunately, it's not used on 8TB+ disks yet, so you're safe. The problem will be getting replacements for these, as it's not safe to just buy HDDs anymore.

sqldba 7y ago

Jesus what a pile of drivel. Zero commitment to addressing the misleading advertising or making amends.

PeterStuer 7y ago

Has WD also bamboozeled NAS Raid enclosure sellers such as Synology? If you go into their compqtibility lists you will find the WD Red with SMR (the WDxxxEFAX series) listed as compatible, but with a specific reference to their SMR KB page which just warns not to mix SMR and PMR drives in the same raid volume. https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/PMR_SMR_hard_disk_drives https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutoria...

onli 7y ago
> bamboozeled Defrauded is the word you were searching.