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Hopefully Seagate and the other manufacturers that've been caught doing this will follow suit. It sucks to be a tech consumer buying expensive hardware like thi

by sq_ 6y ago

Hopefully Seagate and the other manufacturers that've been caught doing this will follow suit. It sucks to be a tech consumer buying expensive hardware like this and not feeling like you can trust the company selling it.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Which is precisely I was surprised when Western Digital's initial response didn't include a list like this one. From my perspective as a consumer, WD has turned a disaster into an advantage. I now know that WD drives will disclose which technology they use—just like I know that Apple will bend over backwards to not secretly throttle battery performance. I can't say as much for other manufacturers.
- sq_ 6y ago
  Good point. I actually just discovered via a link in the TomsHardware article that the Seagate drive I purchased a couple weeks ago is, in fact, SMR. While I shouldn't have issues with it because my workloads aren't particularly write-heavy, this has definitely not helped my trust in Seagate.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  > From my perspective as a consumer, WD has turned a disaster into an advantage. I disagree. They explicitly denied it for months until the tech press started reporting on it. They showed nothing but contempt for their customers. Edit: I’m never going to forget this: “Well the higher team contacted me back and informed me that the information I requested about whether or not the WD60EFAX was a SMR or PMR would not be provided to me. They said that information is not disclosed to consumers. LOL. WOW.“ From: https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-magnetic-recording/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shin...
  - noncoml 6y ago
    Vote with your money and don’t buy WD.
    - e40 6y ago
      Who to buy? Seagate did the same thing.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        What exact same thing? Using SMR, or using SMR without mentioning it while claiming that the drives were suitable for RAID?
        e40 6y ago
        I read here they used SMR without mentioning it and clarified it on their website. Don't know if they said the drives were suitable for RAID.
        syshum 6y ago
        They did not, Seagate did not disclose some of the their Desktop Channel drives were SMR, the NAS, aka IronWolf, drives are all CMR, have always been CMR, and according to seagate will always be CMR https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seagate-says-network-attached-storage-and-smr-dont-mix/?comments=1 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seaga...
        tracker1 6y ago
        They only used SMR without disclosing for general purpose drives... while bad, not as bad... their IronWolf and IronWolf Pro (NAS) drives are not SMR. As I mentioned in another comment, equally pissed WD did this on (albiet smallest size) a Black label drive. WTF would they do this on their "high performance" segment is beyond me, and completely unreasonable.
    - bityard 6y ago
      All HDD manufacturers shipped SMR drives without telling anyone, WD was just the one that got the press because they tried lying about it first.
  - syshum 6y ago
    It makes since that the Parent does not view WD actions as bad since they also did not view Apple's actions as bad. Of course both companies are on my never buy list now, but some people have lower standards.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  I disagree. These drives are not fit for installation into a RAID, and even being transparent about that doesn't fix the technical issues with SMR drives in that setting. And yet, WD is still explicitly advertising them for that purpose. From their site: "Reliable Designed to operate in the always-on environment of a NAS or RAID configuration" So right now, today, they are steering people to buy these drives for an application that they are 100% not fit for. To me, that's still a disaster.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  That's one reaction. Another reaction might be analogous to Dieselgate - someone might regard this as reflecting on all drives with spinning platters. I tend to think the revealing of dishonesty has negative externalities as a general rule. Even though of course we would rather know than not.
- Lazare 6y ago
  That's certainly an interpretation. From my point of view, by doing the wrong thing initially, and then (especially) by persisting in it for so long, they've just turned a disaster into a bigger disaster. I haven't walked away from this feeling like WD is fundamentally honest and open and can be trusted to disclose critical information without prompting; I walked away feeling like WD is fundamentally dishonest, and will lie even after being caught. "They stopped lying eventually!" is not a strong defense. > I now know that WD drives will disclose which technology they use Do you? I certainly don't. All I know is they have made, under extreme pressure, a once-off disclosure of unknown accuracy around their current drive models.
- bcrl 6y ago
  You appear to be under the mistaken perception that SMR drives are an appropriate product for some markets. SMR drives are not suitable for any market. SMR drives were supposed to cut costs by 25+%, but the savings never materialized. Instead, we now have a situation where products with a complete nightmare of a performance profile are being forced into consumers hands when an educated consumer would reject the product outright if they knew what they were buying. Sorry, SMR HDDs are junk. The sooner the industry realizes that they're not suitable for any purpose, the better. Having a device where 4KB writes sometimes take seconds to complete is just plain unacceptable in 2020.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    What if you're trying to fit a large amount of data into the smallest physical form factor possible? What if you have data you want to write once and then store for an extended period? What if you're just on an ultra low budget?
    - NullPrefix 6y ago
      WD black or NAS drives don't really fit the ultra low budget criteria.
    - StillBored 6y ago
      You buy tape.
    - bcrl 6y ago
      The highest capacity drives are not SMR, they're CMR. Why? Because nobody who stores large amounts of data wants to buy SMR drives. SMR drives are garbage and will continue to remain garbage. They're a dead end technology. For those wondering why SMR drives are so bad, consider the following: SMR drives basically make the same trade-off that flash makes, but with a magnetic media that has a significant seek time and bandwidth penalty compared to flash. Any time a non-sequential write is made to an SMR drive, the whole "block" (which can be many megabytes in size) needs to be read from the disk into memory, written out somewhere else on the disk after which you can finally perform the equivalent of a flash sector erase and start writing data out sequentially again. The catch is that your hard drive can only perform sequential i/o at maybe 200MB/s vs the 3GB/s flash can. Flash sectors are also measured in kilobytes (128KB is a common size), while SMR "sectors" can end up being 16-128MB in size. Do the math. The latency is a disaster as we're talking hundreds to thousands of milliseconds of latency to do an erase. Flash can erase a sector in a millisecond, and you can have multiple erases occurring in parallel across multiple planes and dies. An SMR drive can have exactly 1 erase operation in flight at a time. If SMR drives were of any value, you'd see them at the high end of the capacity spectrum. It's funny how those products don't seem to exist.
AlexandrB 6y ago
Seagate already did a few days ago: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seagate-says-network-attached-storage-and-smr-dont-mix/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seaga...

by sq_ 6y ago

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

Which is precisely I was surprised when Western Digital's initial response didn't include a list like this one. From my perspective as a consumer, WD has turned a disaster into an advantage. I now know that WD drives will disclose which technology they use—just like I know that Apple will bend over backwards to not secretly throttle battery performance. I can't say as much for other manufacturers.

sq_ 6y ago
Good point. I actually just discovered via a link in the TomsHardware article that the Seagate drive I purchased a couple weeks ago is, in fact, SMR. While I shouldn't have issues with it because my workloads aren't particularly write-heavy, this has definitely not helped my trust in Seagate.
AlexandrB 6y ago
> From my perspective as a consumer, WD has turned a disaster into an advantage. I disagree. They explicitly denied it for months until the tech press started reporting on it. They showed nothing but contempt for their customers. Edit: I’m never going to forget this: “Well the higher team contacted me back and informed me that the information I requested about whether or not the WD60EFAX was a SMR or PMR would not be provided to me. They said that information is not disclosed to consumers. LOL. WOW.“ From: https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-magnetic-recording/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shin...
- noncoml 6y ago
  Vote with your money and don’t buy WD.
  - e40 6y ago
    Who to buy? Seagate did the same thing.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      What exact same thing? Using SMR, or using SMR without mentioning it while claiming that the drives were suitable for RAID?
      - e40 6y ago
        I read here they used SMR without mentioning it and clarified it on their website. Don't know if they said the drives were suitable for RAID.
        syshum 6y ago
        They did not, Seagate did not disclose some of the their Desktop Channel drives were SMR, the NAS, aka IronWolf, drives are all CMR, have always been CMR, and according to seagate will always be CMR https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seagate-says-network-attached-storage-and-smr-dont-mix/?comments=1 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seaga...
        tracker1 6y ago
        They only used SMR without disclosing for general purpose drives... while bad, not as bad... their IronWolf and IronWolf Pro (NAS) drives are not SMR. As I mentioned in another comment, equally pissed WD did this on (albiet smallest size) a Black label drive. WTF would they do this on their "high performance" segment is beyond me, and completely unreasonable.
  - bityard 6y ago
    All HDD manufacturers shipped SMR drives without telling anyone, WD was just the one that got the press because they tried lying about it first.
- syshum 6y ago
  It makes since that the Parent does not view WD actions as bad since they also did not view Apple's actions as bad. Of course both companies are on my never buy list now, but some people have lower standards.
kstrauser 6y ago
I disagree. These drives are not fit for installation into a RAID, and even being transparent about that doesn't fix the technical issues with SMR drives in that setting. And yet, WD is still explicitly advertising them for that purpose. From their site: "Reliable Designed to operate in the always-on environment of a NAS or RAID configuration" So right now, today, they are steering people to buy these drives for an application that they are 100% not fit for. To me, that's still a disaster.
perl4ever 6y ago
That's one reaction. Another reaction might be analogous to Dieselgate - someone might regard this as reflecting on all drives with spinning platters. I tend to think the revealing of dishonesty has negative externalities as a general rule. Even though of course we would rather know than not.
Lazare 6y ago
That's certainly an interpretation. From my point of view, by doing the wrong thing initially, and then (especially) by persisting in it for so long, they've just turned a disaster into a bigger disaster. I haven't walked away from this feeling like WD is fundamentally honest and open and can be trusted to disclose critical information without prompting; I walked away feeling like WD is fundamentally dishonest, and will lie even after being caught. "They stopped lying eventually!" is not a strong defense. > I now know that WD drives will disclose which technology they use Do you? I certainly don't. All I know is they have made, under extreme pressure, a once-off disclosure of unknown accuracy around their current drive models.
bcrl 6y ago
You appear to be under the mistaken perception that SMR drives are an appropriate product for some markets. SMR drives are not suitable for any market. SMR drives were supposed to cut costs by 25+%, but the savings never materialized. Instead, we now have a situation where products with a complete nightmare of a performance profile are being forced into consumers hands when an educated consumer would reject the product outright if they knew what they were buying. Sorry, SMR HDDs are junk. The sooner the industry realizes that they're not suitable for any purpose, the better. Having a device where 4KB writes sometimes take seconds to complete is just plain unacceptable in 2020.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  What if you're trying to fit a large amount of data into the smallest physical form factor possible? What if you have data you want to write once and then store for an extended period? What if you're just on an ultra low budget?
  - NullPrefix 6y ago
    WD black or NAS drives don't really fit the ultra low budget criteria.
  - StillBored 6y ago
    You buy tape.
  - bcrl 6y ago
    The highest capacity drives are not SMR, they're CMR. Why? Because nobody who stores large amounts of data wants to buy SMR drives. SMR drives are garbage and will continue to remain garbage. They're a dead end technology. For those wondering why SMR drives are so bad, consider the following: SMR drives basically make the same trade-off that flash makes, but with a magnetic media that has a significant seek time and bandwidth penalty compared to flash. Any time a non-sequential write is made to an SMR drive, the whole "block" (which can be many megabytes in size) needs to be read from the disk into memory, written out somewhere else on the disk after which you can finally perform the equivalent of a flash sector erase and start writing data out sequentially again. The catch is that your hard drive can only perform sequential i/o at maybe 200MB/s vs the 3GB/s flash can. Flash sectors are also measured in kilobytes (128KB is a common size), while SMR "sectors" can end up being 16-128MB in size. Do the math. The latency is a disaster as we're talking hundreds to thousands of milliseconds of latency to do an erase. Flash can erase a sector in a millisecond, and you can have multiple erases occurring in parallel across multiple planes and dies. An SMR drive can have exactly 1 erase operation in flight at a time. If SMR drives were of any value, you'd see them at the high end of the capacity spectrum. It's funny how those products don't seem to exist.

AlexandrB 6y ago

Seagate already did a few days ago: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seagate-says-network-attached-storage-and-smr-dont-mix/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seaga...