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The Red series was originally marketed and positioned specifically for Home/SMB NAS use. I have 4 of these (the old versions from before the SMR switch) running
by PeterStuer 6y ago
The Red series was originally marketed and positioned specifically for Home/SMB NAS use. I have 4 of these (the old versions from before the SMR switch) running in my Synology NAS for years, and a 5th lying spare in its original sealed packaging just in case.
When WD stealthily swapped to using device managed SMR technology in the series, they hoped that typical users wouldn't notice the change in behavior of the drives, as they assumed a small NAS would have enough downtime for the drive to manage the data being behind the scenes rearranged towards the slow shingled sections.
This assumption is not always true, but specifically it doesn't hold at all when an array has to be rebuild e.g. because of a drive failure in a raid array, as that requires writing data continuously and for a long time.
WD was caught not just using a technology that made their drives unsuited for the advertised purpose, but initially even denying that they had done so.
- ComodoHacker 6y agoThey were so assured in their drives' quality they haven't thought one of them can fail and others face rebuild workload. /s
- beagle3 6y agoOr, they may have actually tested raid rebuild on a system that did not have a single write during the rebuild and only with fresh drives - under this very specific use case, if the RAID controller does things right, all writes are sequential from the first disk sector until the last -- which is a use case that SMR doesn't slow down in; essentially, the only such use case.
- jotm 6y agoOn a related note, RAID rebuild failing on slower drives is ridiculous these days. Is it so hard to implement something like buffer underrun protection in CD/DVD writers? Or just longer/adjustable wait times?
- zozbot234 6y agoThese issues mostly crop up with hardware RAID controllers that were not designed for anything like that. And what you'd need is actually the opposite of buffer underrun protection; you have to protect against congestion, whereas having the drive idle would not per se be an issue.
- ndespres 6y agoThe enterprise hardware RAID controllers have battery backed memory that is heavily utilized during a rebuild. Operations that would take days without it are reduced to hours. I'm not sure what a typical NAS does though.
- hordeallergy 6y agoIf I'm not mistaken it's not the entire red series - it excludes 8TB.
- nix23 6y agoTrue, there's a good list: https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/ https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-d...
- PeterStuer 6y agoThe original 2TB - 3TB - 4TB - 6TB Reds with the 'EFRX' suffix were CMR, the later ones with the 'EFAX' suffix are SMR drives.
- donatj 6y agoUpdate: EFBX looks to be entirely CMR Know anything about EFBX? SMR I assume? I literally have one arriving today to replace a disk in my single disk redundancy JBOD The whole disk buying process was irksome because I up until WD shut them down always depended on HGST.
- PeterStuer 6y agoIf you mean the FFBX (I can't find any reference to EFBX models), the Red Pro series, those are CMS (and 7200rpm which is what the B stands for).
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago8TB SMR does not currently exist in the consumer level.
- d33 6y agoNot really true: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=seagate%20archive%208tb%20smr https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=seagate%20archive%208t...