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I don't understand why the WD Red 2-6 TB range was specifically assigned to SMR, not the smaller or larger drives in that line. Is it especially price competit
by teruakohatu 7y ago
I don't understand why the WD Red 2-6 TB range was specifically assigned to SMR, not the smaller or larger drives in that line.
Is it especially price competitive?
- akersten 7y agoJust spitballing, but it's probably the size range where the difference between one and two physical platters is whether they use SMR or not. A cost-cutting measure.
- cure 7y agoThat sounds right. I got a WD60EFAX and a Seagate ST6000VN0033 a few months ago, and the WD is significantly lighter than the Seagate.
- Macha 7y agoBut also they've segmented away business users to Red Pro, Gold and Ultrastar drives for a few years, so I'd imagine sales of Reds today mostly fall in that range so more motivation to shave costs. With SSD pricing these days, <2TB hard drives just don't really make sense, but also I'm guessing very few home users need/want more than 8TB of storage.
- gowld 7y agoThere's a large market for "power" users who want high specs on paper but don't need them. The market response is to fake the specs or make compromising tradeoffs in lesser known specs. Often it works out fine and everyone is happy, but sometimes a bunch of customer use cases get broken.
- sjwright 7y agoMy theory would be that they’re the highest volume sellers, and where the margins are thinnest.
- dehrmann 7y agoCould be a combination of yields and binning.
- fmajid 7y agoBecause they assume anyone buying a drive that small is price-sensitive. Except they didn't actually lower the price when they crippled the drives with SMR.