8 ms·

I’m very happy that this tactic has backfired so spectacularly for WD. I don’t know what the total impact on their bottom line is, but what I’m seeing is a huge

I’m very happy that this tactic has backfired so spectacularly for WD. I don’t know what the total impact on their bottom line is, but what I’m seeing is a huge reputation as damage for WD. People are avoiding putting WD in their NAS in general, even if they have plenty of drives that are fine with it!

tjoff 6y ago
I have such a hard time to understand how the risk vs. reward ratio for pulling this stunt made any sense. SMR does not have a great reputation, to put it in drives specifically targeted for NASes and enthusiasts is a very bold move.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  Given the price premium on these drives in the first place I don't even get why they'd do this? Stick the SMR drives in the EasyStore line or whatever, which is regularly half the $/gb of the bare RED drives. That'd probably also discourage some shucking.
  - smacktoward 6y ago
    In every company, no matter how obscene the margins they're making on a given product, there is someone arguing that those margins could be even larger if they just cut a few corners. Eventually someone listens to that person, and decades of painstakingly built-up brand value gets thrown out the window in order to bring home six nickels tomorrow instead of five.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - cbsmith 6y ago
    As mentioned in the Manfred Berger talk, the tech is supposed to, in theory, get you a 25-50% cost effectiveness advantage. Obviously the market prices don't reflect that, but that explains why they'd do this.
    - loeg 6y ago
      Reality seems to be more like 10% on a capacity basis. On a performance basis, of course, it's extremely negative.
      - cbsmith 6y ago
        Magnetic disks are generally valued on capacity, but at least as I heard the talk, he was talking about it growing to a 50% difference as they pushed the limits. I get that the reds are more performance oriented, but capacity is still a key factor (if not, you just go SSD and be done with it).
        loeg 6y ago
        I get that 50% has been the sort of marketing aim for "why bother support SMR at all," but until they actually get there, it's just marketing. Reality is ~10%. Magnetic disks are valued on capacity only because people considered CMR HDDs a performance floor. When they realize how bad SMR is, I think performance becomes a factor. If you're talking about GB per volume, SSDs beat HDDs of all stripes there: the biggest HDDs are 16 TB in a 3.5" form factor, while the biggest SSDs are 100 TB in the same form factor. 10 or 50% improvement in HDDs wouldn't begin to bridge that gap. SMR should be understood to be sort of a fast Tape, rather than slow CMR HDD.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        > SMR should be understood to be sort of a fast Tape, rather than slow CMR HDD. I wouldn't go that far. If I can assume that the firmware won't cause a lot of problems all by itself, I think in my desktop I'd slightly prefer a 7200RPM SMR drive to an equal-price 5400RPM CMR drive. And no matter what kind of hard drive(s) you're using, take a $20 SSD and use half of it as a cache with writeback enabled.
        cbsmith 6y ago
        > SMR should be understood to be sort of a fast Tape, rather than slow CMR HDD. In fairness, more like an array of tape drives. ;-) I get what you're saying about how it hasn't panned out in reality, but the question was why did they even try SMR, and I expect that was motivated by the misguided potential of the win.
  - kasabali 6y ago
    They do. Corresponding 2-6TB Blue drives are also SMR and that are shipped inside external drives. Only Reds got the attention because of ZFS issues. I suspect Blue and Red drive have a lot of common in manufacturing they switched all drives in same capacity together.
    - andoriyu 6y ago
      Red is getting attention not just because of ZFS, but because Reds are targeted and marketed for workloads that don't work well with SMR. It was well known before that Red are trash compared to Red Pro which IIRC are rebranded HGST DeskStar NAS.
- rwmj 6y ago
  > SMR does not have a great reputation SMR is fine if you know what SMR is and what you're doing. It might even be fine given a sufficiently advanced translation layer (which apparently doesn't exist yet). The problem isn't SMR, it's selling a product which uses SMR and hiding that fact from the consumer, and I can't forgive WD for that.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > It might even be fine given a sufficiently advanced translation layer (which apparently doesn't exist yet). Apparently f2fs does well with it?
    - simcop2387 6y ago
      Not terribly surprising, f2fs and similar filesystems are log-based systems. Rather than overwrite the old data they almost always try to write to the next new area. This ends up working really well for flash technology because writing to existing areas is expensive. You have to read in a 1-4MB area depending on the block size, make your changes to that, erase that area entirely, and then write the changed version. [Those sizes might be a little off but it's what I remember]. Some of that may be hidden by the disk's controller but it has to happen on every write to an area with existing data. SMR is similar in this respect because you have to read, change, and write large blocks together because of the way the tech works. So I'd expect anything that's directly optimized for low level flash memory to work similarly ok performance wise for it. The real problem comes when you can't work like that, in particular this happens when you're low on free space or if you're in a situation where relocating data isn't possible or known that it needs to happen. RAID setups are typically the worst case for this, since they'll effectively treat the entire disk as used and can't relocate data on it. ZFS is a bit more complicated with this but effectively ends up the same.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    There have been some experiment with modified XFS using SMR drives natively: https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SDC15_presentations/smr/HannesReinecke_Strategies_for_running_unmodified_FS_SMR.pdf https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SDC15_presentations... You put the journal and metadata on the continuous part and data on the shingled part, making sure you only ever add to what was written previously in a shingled segment by using copy-on-write. And sporadically you reclaim a segment. This should be much more efficient than a block layer translation layer that knows nothing about the filesystem.
- willcipriano 6y ago
  >I have such a hard time to understand how the risk vs. reward ratio for pulling this stunt made any sense. Classical economics likes to think of firms as rational entities working to maximize profit over the long term. In my experience that makes much of what companies do inexplicable. Instead I view firms as large groups of individuals all acting in their own self interest, this seems more complex but really all you have to know is what the incentive structure is to understand the choices a company makes. Similarly I've found you can also do this in reverse. It is a virtual certainty that from a compensation perspective moving to SMR was better for the individuals who made that choice.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    Fortunately, economic theory is more broad than classic economics. Managerial and behaviour theories here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm Linked to from the Economics article under the Theory section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics The theory your suggesting here has been known since at least the late 50s. You might also be aware of, or find interesting anyway, the principal–agent problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... Edit: typo
    - jacques_chester 6y ago
      I don't think this reply should be downvoted. It might be slightly spicy, but it does reflect that economics in the 20th century made enormous strides in understanding the observable behaviour of actual firms and markets. Transaction costs, agent problems, information economics, institutional economics, mechanism design and so on are powerful insights into the world around us. I've learned more about how software grows and spreads from economists than from software engineers.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        It's a useful bit of information, but it's insulting the comment it replies to without actually disagreeing at all. There's a reason the initial comment said "classical" economics! I can see why it earned some downvotes.
- tzs 6y ago
  Ars Technica did some detailed testing of these drives a couple weeks ago. See "We put Western Digital’s dreaded SMR Red drive to the test" [1]. They found that they won't work for ZFS but are actually OK in most NASes. Here is their conclusion: -------- begin quote We want to be very clear: we agree with Seagate's Greg Belloni, who stated on the company's behalf that they "do not recommend SMR for NAS applications." At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware. With that said, we can see why Western Digital believed, after what we assume was a considerable amount of laboratory testing, that their disks would be "OK" for typical NAS usage. Although obviously slower than their Ironwolf competitors, they performed adequately both for conventional RAID rebuilds and for typical day-to-day NAS file-sharing workloads. We were genuinely impressed with how well the firmware adapted itself to most workloads—this is a clear example of RFC 1925 2.(3) in action, but the thrust does appear sufficient to the purpose. Unfortunately, it would appear that Western Digital did not test ZFS, which a substantial minority of their customer base depends upon. These tests may not be great news for either the American or Canadian class-action lawsuits currently underway against Western Digital, but they aren't the end of the line for those lawsuits, either. Even in the best case, the SMR models of WD Red underperform their earlier, non-SMR counterparts substantially—and consumers were not given clear notice of the downgrade. If the same firmware was being used to make substantially larger drives available to consumers than would otherwise be possible, and the limitations of those drives were adequately explained, we would probably be gushing over its utility and function. Unfortunately, Western Digital has so far only chosen to use it to cut manufacturing costs on small disks, without even passing the savings along to the consumer. -------- end quote That last paragraph may be key. It sounds like if these drives had been marketed a little different and priced a little different they could have been a good deal for many NAS users. I wonder what the chances are that they were originally intended for just that, and something got mixed up or miscommunication between design and release? [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr-disks-arent-great-but-theyre-not-garbage/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr...
  - vetinari 6y ago
    I did a reshape, in phase 1 from 4-drive RAID5 to 5-drive RAID6 and then, in phase 2, from 5-drive RAID6 to 8-drive RAID6. Everything with Synology NAS, with typical Synology setup (mdraid, btrfs on top). The new 4 drives were the infamous 6TB EFAX. The phase 1 took 12 days, the phase 2 took 3 days. So my personal experience is radically different than Ars Technica's.
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  SMR is not as bad for desktop-style workloads as you might think. If you have enough storage for cache and metadata, you can get great performance because all of your writes are sequentialized. If you had 32GB of Optane and 4 TB of SMR properly tuned that would be one heck of a desktop drive, but (1) you have to really eliminate all the bottlenecks and (2) who needs a desktop drive large enough that SMR is worth it?
  - StillBored 6y ago
    The problem is that once the buffers are full the drive effectively stops accepting commands while it rewrites a SMR region. When that happens depending on what your doing, the drive might just get kicked from an array, or your whole system might freeze if some critical page needs to be read back in and it can't get sufficient priority and a command slot. I guess the vast number of people won't ever write more than a buffers full of data, or the drive will never get fragmented sufficiently that even small write operations amplify into entire drive rewrites.....
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      Smarter firmware would detect the case you are discussing, and re-designate a part of the SMR drive to be regular(non-SMR space). For that to work, you need the host OS to be able to see that the drive has just "shrunk". Obviously, you still have data on it while it's shrinking, so the reality is the OS needs to give the drive a list of sectors which can be "shrunk away". One simple approach would be for a daemon to create a massive file filled with "MAGICBYTESMAGICBYTESMAGICBYTES...". As that data is 'written' to the drive, the drive sees that it's the magic bytes, and rather than storing the data, simply marks those sectors as no longer needed. As soon as enough sectors in a row have that designation, reformat them as non-smr, and use as regular (non-smr) disk space. Then, a few hours or days later, the drive can rewrite the data back to be SMR, then tell the daemon, which can remove the magic bytes and delete the files, and your free disk space increases again. The failure mode of this is that your "6TB" SMR disk ends up with a 3TB file filled with MAGICBYTES, and 3TB of your data. But for the same money, you'd only get to store 3TB of data on a non-SMR drive anyway...
NortySpock 6y ago
Western Digital-branded drives not showing on BackBlaze hard drive reliability tables probably left WD in a blindspot for people looking for reliable drives anyways. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2020/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1...
- ksec 6y ago
  HGST is under Western Digital.
  - syshum 6y ago
    HGST brand was killed, UltraStar is now WD Branded not HGST
- arminiusreturns 6y ago
  I've been reading the backblaze report since it started coming out (thanks to the backblaze team as always for being so transparent!). It become obvious to me as far back as 2015 that WD was a brand to avoid... and it seems by the end of 2019 backblaze had phased them almost completely out... for a reason.
sleepydog 6y ago
The hard drive market has shrunk considerably in the past ~5 years. What other choices are there? I remember Seagate having a not-so-great reputation in the late 00s, but now they seem like the most obvious alternative. Are we going to be stuck oscillating between ~4 vendors?
- tomatocracy 6y ago
  Toshiba are a reasonable bet now. I have several of the N300 drives which have performed pretty well so far.
- occamrazor 6y ago
  There are actually only three producers left: WD, Seagate and Toshiba.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    Toshiba is the only one without a tarnished reputation.
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      And Backblaze seemed to think highly of 'em as of 2015: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/a-look-at-backblazes-toshiba-hard-drives/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/a-look-at-backblazes-toshiba-... It's interesting that Toshiba apparently acquired Hitachi's production assets during the HGST→WD acquisition. HGST had a pretty good reputation at the time, so I feel like this bodes well for Hitachi if their drives are indeed a continuation of that. If I do need some spinning rust at some point I guess I'll have to give 'em a whirl.
    - jclulow 6y ago
      Have had some serious and deeply negative experiences with mixed workload performance on Toshiba disks in the last five years. Allegedly enterprise-grade 2.5" spindles, becoming deeply confused when handed both reads and writes concurrently. Test with your workload, of course, but my default position is: beware!
MintelIE 6y ago
Personally I won't buy another WD or Sandisk product ever again. Companies like this don't ever really come off as being sorry for the scams they pull, so it's best to just cut them off completely. I de-Googled too because of their shady practices. EDIT: For those who can't use the Internet to look things up, Sandisk and G-Technology and some random thing called Upthere are all WD brands.
- vl 6y ago
  What’s wrong with Sandisk?
- mey 6y ago
  What has Sandisk been up to?
  - tw04 6y ago
    WD owns Sandisk. https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/12/11662018/western-digital-sandisk-deal-complete https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/12/11662018/western-digital-...
washadjeffmad 6y ago
A little too much outrage for my taste. Every major HDD manufacturer was found offering SMR. WD was just the first to be held to task because they're so incredibly popular with shuckers. Seagate SMRs were found before WDs because we only purchased ≥8TB EasyStores, which are unaffected. For the lines they were supplied under, SMR characteristics don't impede 95% of customers. The rest are small-timers trying to avoid paying for warranties. No one buying Enterprise NAS was affected. edit: I guess we all decided to disagree by downvote today. Words tomorrow, maybe?
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  Actually I think you’re missing the point entirely. I have a 4 bay NAS that I use to back up all of my and my fiancé’s media so losing a phone isn't a catastrophe. I’m trusting that the NAS will actually rebuild in the event of a drive failure or it provides very little actual protection. WD shipped drives which were very unlikely to rebuild successfully. The upshot of that is that they lied to me and as a consequence have placed priceless data at risk from a drive failure. And had I known that I wouldn’t have bought their drives, so I’m materially harmed by it. I don’t shuck drives, I buy through retail channels like Newegg. I think you’re getting downvoted because you don’t understand the gravity of the problem and your victim blaming. Otherwise there’s nothing to disagree with because what you’re saying isn’t really supported in fact.
  - washadjeffmad 6y ago
    Thanks for helping me understand the demographic affected. This isn't a rebuttal, but I hope you don't lose anything, so you should know that a NAS is not a backup. They provide redundancy and availability, but no number or type of disks will save your data from being lost in a fire or flood if you keep it all in one place. SMR drives, if you know what you're buying them for, are perfect for backups and write few, read many applications, which it kind of sounds like you want. They're not inferior or at premature risk of failure, just specialized. Also, I'm not saying you have no right to be unhappy with finding out why, but were you really dissatisfied with the performance of your NAS before these hyperbolic exposes went out?
- 6y ago
m463 6y ago
If only it had backfired for everyone when the marketing folks changed from hexadecimal capacity sizes to decimal. 1000000 = 1M
- nayuki 6y ago
  1,000,000 is exactly equal to 1 mega. It's the other part of the computer industry (Windows Explorer, RAM sizes) that abused the notation to pretend 1 kilo = 1024. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
- mjevans 6y ago
  My argument has been: Can I store just ONE byte at a time? Can I expand by singular bytes in a normal system? For hard drives, and even flash memory, the physical size of a sector converged, rather naturally, to a multiple of system word size, and since that had also converged to a power of 2, to a larger power of 2. Thus hard drives have sectors that were 512 bytes (4096 or '4Kbits'), and also why the smallest write available for modern drives is a multiple of 2. Binary is the native nomenclature of computers. It only makes sense that related equipment should also use the native (binary) engineering unit approximations as a result. Though for communications equipment, they do have variable sized packets, which even though computers generate 8 bit 'octet' based signals might technically be used by some other format that doesn't; and talking about the actual speed on the wire conveying that in maximum possible raw bit states is a tiny bit confusing when the rest are binary units, but it's less strongly wrong than a system where the lowest addressable (real) unit is binary based.
  - nayuki 6y ago
    You're basically saying that prefixes like kilo- have a context-dependent meaning - usually 1000, but sometimes 1024. We know how well that worked out historically, right? e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ounce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ounce "the international troy ounce is equal to exactly 31.1034768 grams", "The international avoirdupois ounce is defined as exactly 28.349523125 g", "A fluid ounce (abbreviated fl oz, fl. oz. or oz. fl.) is a unit of volume equal to about 28.4 ml in the imperial system or about 29.6 ml in the US system". By not respecting the definition that kilo = 1000, you are deliberately sowing confusion and undermining the metric system as a simple, consistent, universal measurement system.
yellowapple 6y ago
Yeah, that move turned me from being a more-or-less diehard WD fan (i.e. picking it as my first choice for spinning disks) to being really skeptical of it; if they're willing to cheap out on that, then for me it casts doubt on the reliability of the hardware, too (and reliability is literally my only concern, even for my own desktops and laptops; WD could sell drives at a tenth of the performance as, say, a Seagate, but if it's even a little bit more reliable - which, in my observation from a variety of different use cases, it historically has been - I'll pick it every time). The good news is that I've basically stopped buying spinning rust, so this is more of a "well bummer" type of mood than an "oh shit I gotta scramble for a better primary vendor" mood. Even for server/NAS use I'm more likely to go for a Crucial/Kingston mix nowadays than I am for a WD/Seagate mix, both because SSDs have matured enough to be more reliable for a lot of things (less moving parts = less mechanical wear/tear and less sensitivity to vibrations¹, and with RAID a dying flash module is less of a "game over" moment - though things have gotten a lot better on this front, too) and because they perform a lot better (both in terms of speed and in terms of thermal/energy efficiency). ---- ¹: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  For SSDs you can look at the individual components they are made from, like the controller boards.
- esyir 6y ago
  Unfortunately for bulk data storage, spinning rust is currently the only viable option at the consumer level. For now, until ssds reach competitive prices at the same scales, we're stuck with them.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    For how I typically lean for storage (RAID1 "cells" with each disk from a separate manufacturer, combined into either a RAID10 or a JBOD), and thus how I typically buy drives, SSD v. HDD is actually surprisingly close price-wise, especially when looking at 2.5" SATA or SAS (which is what I typically buy, both because 3.5" SSDs strangely don't exist and because I can stuff more of 'em into an enclosure; plus, quite a few servers don't even take 3.5" drives). For example, consider two different 2TB cell setups: - SSD: Crucial MX500 + Samsung 860 QVO = $473.73 on Newegg - HDD: WD Blue WD20SPZX + Toshiba L200 = $168.57 on Newegg On the one hand, the SSD cell is a whole 2.81× more expensive. On the other hand, the SSD cell is only 2.81× more expensive. This narrows to 2× in the case of a 1TB (well, technically 960GB in the SSD case) cell setup: - SSD: Crucial MX500 + Kingston A400 = $236.54 on Newegg (this is my typical setup for a RAID1) - HDD: WD Blue WD10SPZX + Toshiba L200 = $117.13 on Newegg Now, to be fair, this is excluding Seagate, which is stupidly cheap and would widen that gap (and historically I've bought Seagate strictly as a secondary for these sorts of "cells", but given my bad experiences with Seagate I'm inclined to ignore them and go with WD+Toshiba if possible for a given target size). It's also excluding 3.5" drives (and therefore notably excluding WD Reds entirely), which doesn't help for a 1TB cell (Seagate Cheetah NS + WD Red = $118.75) or a 2TB cell (Seagate IronWolf + WD Red = $167.74), but does help for bigger cell sizes that wouldn't be possible with 2.5" at all without major sacrifices in vendor redundancy and price (for example, a 4TB cell w/ Toshiba N300 + WD Red = $225.91, v. Samsung 860 QVO v. WD Blue = $1049.17 - even higher if I wanted to keep Kingston in the mix - or two of the above 2TB cells for only slightly cheaper). On the other hand, this is including 5400 RPM drives; if I required 7200 RPM (as most NAS drives are) then the 1TB cell cost jumps up to $134.98 (WD Black + Seagate BarraCuda), and if I needed 10k RPM or SAS then I'd probably be springing for a WD XE WD9001BKHG + Toshiba AL13SEB900, which would bring the cell cost up even higher to $164.75 (while also losing 100GB of capacity), or even higher to $186.38 if I wanted to swap the WD for a Seagate Savvio ST9900705SS and have that 64MB of cache on both sides of the mirror (thus bringing the cost difference to a mere 1.27×). I'm also artificially keeping out a whole swath of SSD manufacturers in the above figures; never heard of "Team Group" or "Goldenfir", but if I had zero qualms about reliability I could put together a 1TB cell with those for $182.98 (on par w/ the 10k RPM cell), or for a 2TB cell I could go with a Crucial BX500 + Patriot P200 for $399.98. ---- That all being to say: SSDs are a lot cheaper nowadays than they were even a couple years ago, and at typical consumer scales they're plenty viable; "good enough" capacity, while also having better performance and lower power consumption.

tjoff 6y ago

I have such a hard time to understand how the risk vs. reward ratio for pulling this stunt made any sense. SMR does not have a great reputation, to put it in drives specifically targeted for NASes and enthusiasts is a very bold move.

kllrnohj 6y ago
Given the price premium on these drives in the first place I don't even get why they'd do this? Stick the SMR drives in the EasyStore line or whatever, which is regularly half the $/gb of the bare RED drives. That'd probably also discourage some shucking.
- smacktoward 6y ago
  In every company, no matter how obscene the margins they're making on a given product, there is someone arguing that those margins could be even larger if they just cut a few corners. Eventually someone listens to that person, and decades of painstakingly built-up brand value gets thrown out the window in order to bring home six nickels tomorrow instead of five.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- cbsmith 6y ago
  As mentioned in the Manfred Berger talk, the tech is supposed to, in theory, get you a 25-50% cost effectiveness advantage. Obviously the market prices don't reflect that, but that explains why they'd do this.
  - loeg 6y ago
    Reality seems to be more like 10% on a capacity basis. On a performance basis, of course, it's extremely negative.
    - cbsmith 6y ago
      Magnetic disks are generally valued on capacity, but at least as I heard the talk, he was talking about it growing to a 50% difference as they pushed the limits. I get that the reds are more performance oriented, but capacity is still a key factor (if not, you just go SSD and be done with it).
      - loeg 6y ago
        I get that 50% has been the sort of marketing aim for "why bother support SMR at all," but until they actually get there, it's just marketing. Reality is ~10%. Magnetic disks are valued on capacity only because people considered CMR HDDs a performance floor. When they realize how bad SMR is, I think performance becomes a factor. If you're talking about GB per volume, SSDs beat HDDs of all stripes there: the biggest HDDs are 16 TB in a 3.5" form factor, while the biggest SSDs are 100 TB in the same form factor. 10 or 50% improvement in HDDs wouldn't begin to bridge that gap. SMR should be understood to be sort of a fast Tape, rather than slow CMR HDD.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        > SMR should be understood to be sort of a fast Tape, rather than slow CMR HDD. I wouldn't go that far. If I can assume that the firmware won't cause a lot of problems all by itself, I think in my desktop I'd slightly prefer a 7200RPM SMR drive to an equal-price 5400RPM CMR drive. And no matter what kind of hard drive(s) you're using, take a $20 SSD and use half of it as a cache with writeback enabled.
        cbsmith 6y ago
        > SMR should be understood to be sort of a fast Tape, rather than slow CMR HDD. In fairness, more like an array of tape drives. ;-) I get what you're saying about how it hasn't panned out in reality, but the question was why did they even try SMR, and I expect that was motivated by the misguided potential of the win.
- kasabali 6y ago
  They do. Corresponding 2-6TB Blue drives are also SMR and that are shipped inside external drives. Only Reds got the attention because of ZFS issues. I suspect Blue and Red drive have a lot of common in manufacturing they switched all drives in same capacity together.
  - andoriyu 6y ago
    Red is getting attention not just because of ZFS, but because Reds are targeted and marketed for workloads that don't work well with SMR. It was well known before that Red are trash compared to Red Pro which IIRC are rebranded HGST DeskStar NAS.
rwmj 6y ago
> SMR does not have a great reputation SMR is fine if you know what SMR is and what you're doing. It might even be fine given a sufficiently advanced translation layer (which apparently doesn't exist yet). The problem isn't SMR, it's selling a product which uses SMR and hiding that fact from the consumer, and I can't forgive WD for that.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > It might even be fine given a sufficiently advanced translation layer (which apparently doesn't exist yet). Apparently f2fs does well with it?
  - simcop2387 6y ago
    Not terribly surprising, f2fs and similar filesystems are log-based systems. Rather than overwrite the old data they almost always try to write to the next new area. This ends up working really well for flash technology because writing to existing areas is expensive. You have to read in a 1-4MB area depending on the block size, make your changes to that, erase that area entirely, and then write the changed version. [Those sizes might be a little off but it's what I remember]. Some of that may be hidden by the disk's controller but it has to happen on every write to an area with existing data. SMR is similar in this respect because you have to read, change, and write large blocks together because of the way the tech works. So I'd expect anything that's directly optimized for low level flash memory to work similarly ok performance wise for it. The real problem comes when you can't work like that, in particular this happens when you're low on free space or if you're in a situation where relocating data isn't possible or known that it needs to happen. RAID setups are typically the worst case for this, since they'll effectively treat the entire disk as used and can't relocate data on it. ZFS is a bit more complicated with this but effectively ends up the same.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- m4rtink 6y ago
  There have been some experiment with modified XFS using SMR drives natively: https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SDC15_presentations/smr/HannesReinecke_Strategies_for_running_unmodified_FS_SMR.pdf https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SDC15_presentations... You put the journal and metadata on the continuous part and data on the shingled part, making sure you only ever add to what was written previously in a shingled segment by using copy-on-write. And sporadically you reclaim a segment. This should be much more efficient than a block layer translation layer that knows nothing about the filesystem.
willcipriano 6y ago
>I have such a hard time to understand how the risk vs. reward ratio for pulling this stunt made any sense. Classical economics likes to think of firms as rational entities working to maximize profit over the long term. In my experience that makes much of what companies do inexplicable. Instead I view firms as large groups of individuals all acting in their own self interest, this seems more complex but really all you have to know is what the incentive structure is to understand the choices a company makes. Similarly I've found you can also do this in reverse. It is a virtual certainty that from a compensation perspective moving to SMR was better for the individuals who made that choice.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  Fortunately, economic theory is more broad than classic economics. Managerial and behaviour theories here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm Linked to from the Economics article under the Theory section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics The theory your suggesting here has been known since at least the late 50s. You might also be aware of, or find interesting anyway, the principal–agent problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... Edit: typo
  - jacques_chester 6y ago
    I don't think this reply should be downvoted. It might be slightly spicy, but it does reflect that economics in the 20th century made enormous strides in understanding the observable behaviour of actual firms and markets. Transaction costs, agent problems, information economics, institutional economics, mechanism design and so on are powerful insights into the world around us. I've learned more about how software grows and spreads from economists than from software engineers.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      It's a useful bit of information, but it's insulting the comment it replies to without actually disagreeing at all. There's a reason the initial comment said "classical" economics! I can see why it earned some downvotes.
tzs 6y ago
Ars Technica did some detailed testing of these drives a couple weeks ago. See "We put Western Digital’s dreaded SMR Red drive to the test" [1]. They found that they won't work for ZFS but are actually OK in most NASes. Here is their conclusion: -------- begin quote We want to be very clear: we agree with Seagate's Greg Belloni, who stated on the company's behalf that they "do not recommend SMR for NAS applications." At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware. With that said, we can see why Western Digital believed, after what we assume was a considerable amount of laboratory testing, that their disks would be "OK" for typical NAS usage. Although obviously slower than their Ironwolf competitors, they performed adequately both for conventional RAID rebuilds and for typical day-to-day NAS file-sharing workloads. We were genuinely impressed with how well the firmware adapted itself to most workloads—this is a clear example of RFC 1925 2.(3) in action, but the thrust does appear sufficient to the purpose. Unfortunately, it would appear that Western Digital did not test ZFS, which a substantial minority of their customer base depends upon. These tests may not be great news for either the American or Canadian class-action lawsuits currently underway against Western Digital, but they aren't the end of the line for those lawsuits, either. Even in the best case, the SMR models of WD Red underperform their earlier, non-SMR counterparts substantially—and consumers were not given clear notice of the downgrade. If the same firmware was being used to make substantially larger drives available to consumers than would otherwise be possible, and the limitations of those drives were adequately explained, we would probably be gushing over its utility and function. Unfortunately, Western Digital has so far only chosen to use it to cut manufacturing costs on small disks, without even passing the savings along to the consumer. -------- end quote That last paragraph may be key. It sounds like if these drives had been marketed a little different and priced a little different they could have been a good deal for many NAS users. I wonder what the chances are that they were originally intended for just that, and something got mixed up or miscommunication between design and release? [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr-disks-arent-great-but-theyre-not-garbage/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr...
- vetinari 6y ago
  I did a reshape, in phase 1 from 4-drive RAID5 to 5-drive RAID6 and then, in phase 2, from 5-drive RAID6 to 8-drive RAID6. Everything with Synology NAS, with typical Synology setup (mdraid, btrfs on top). The new 4 drives were the infamous 6TB EFAX. The phase 1 took 12 days, the phase 2 took 3 days. So my personal experience is radically different than Ars Technica's.
PaulHoule 6y ago
SMR is not as bad for desktop-style workloads as you might think. If you have enough storage for cache and metadata, you can get great performance because all of your writes are sequentialized. If you had 32GB of Optane and 4 TB of SMR properly tuned that would be one heck of a desktop drive, but (1) you have to really eliminate all the bottlenecks and (2) who needs a desktop drive large enough that SMR is worth it?
- StillBored 6y ago
  The problem is that once the buffers are full the drive effectively stops accepting commands while it rewrites a SMR region. When that happens depending on what your doing, the drive might just get kicked from an array, or your whole system might freeze if some critical page needs to be read back in and it can't get sufficient priority and a command slot. I guess the vast number of people won't ever write more than a buffers full of data, or the drive will never get fragmented sufficiently that even small write operations amplify into entire drive rewrites.....
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Smarter firmware would detect the case you are discussing, and re-designate a part of the SMR drive to be regular(non-SMR space). For that to work, you need the host OS to be able to see that the drive has just "shrunk". Obviously, you still have data on it while it's shrinking, so the reality is the OS needs to give the drive a list of sectors which can be "shrunk away". One simple approach would be for a daemon to create a massive file filled with "MAGICBYTESMAGICBYTESMAGICBYTES...". As that data is 'written' to the drive, the drive sees that it's the magic bytes, and rather than storing the data, simply marks those sectors as no longer needed. As soon as enough sectors in a row have that designation, reformat them as non-smr, and use as regular (non-smr) disk space. Then, a few hours or days later, the drive can rewrite the data back to be SMR, then tell the daemon, which can remove the magic bytes and delete the files, and your free disk space increases again. The failure mode of this is that your "6TB" SMR disk ends up with a 3TB file filled with MAGICBYTES, and 3TB of your data. But for the same money, you'd only get to store 3TB of data on a non-SMR drive anyway...

NortySpock 6y ago

Western Digital-branded drives not showing on BackBlaze hard drive reliability tables probably left WD in a blindspot for people looking for reliable drives anyways. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2020/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1...

ksec 6y ago
HGST is under Western Digital.
- syshum 6y ago
  HGST brand was killed, UltraStar is now WD Branded not HGST
arminiusreturns 6y ago
I've been reading the backblaze report since it started coming out (thanks to the backblaze team as always for being so transparent!). It become obvious to me as far back as 2015 that WD was a brand to avoid... and it seems by the end of 2019 backblaze had phased them almost completely out... for a reason.

sleepydog 6y ago

The hard drive market has shrunk considerably in the past ~5 years. What other choices are there? I remember Seagate having a not-so-great reputation in the late 00s, but now they seem like the most obvious alternative. Are we going to be stuck oscillating between ~4 vendors?

tomatocracy 6y ago
Toshiba are a reasonable bet now. I have several of the N300 drives which have performed pretty well so far.
occamrazor 6y ago
There are actually only three producers left: WD, Seagate and Toshiba.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Toshiba is the only one without a tarnished reputation.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    And Backblaze seemed to think highly of 'em as of 2015: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/a-look-at-backblazes-toshiba-hard-drives/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/a-look-at-backblazes-toshiba-... It's interesting that Toshiba apparently acquired Hitachi's production assets during the HGST→WD acquisition. HGST had a pretty good reputation at the time, so I feel like this bodes well for Hitachi if their drives are indeed a continuation of that. If I do need some spinning rust at some point I guess I'll have to give 'em a whirl.
  - jclulow 6y ago
    Have had some serious and deeply negative experiences with mixed workload performance on Toshiba disks in the last five years. Allegedly enterprise-grade 2.5" spindles, becoming deeply confused when handed both reads and writes concurrently. Test with your workload, of course, but my default position is: beware!

MintelIE 6y ago

Personally I won't buy another WD or Sandisk product ever again. Companies like this don't ever really come off as being sorry for the scams they pull, so it's best to just cut them off completely. I de-Googled too because of their shady practices. EDIT: For those who can't use the Internet to look things up, Sandisk and G-Technology and some random thing called Upthere are all WD brands.

vl 6y ago
What’s wrong with Sandisk?
mey 6y ago
What has Sandisk been up to?
- tw04 6y ago
  WD owns Sandisk. https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/12/11662018/western-digital-sandisk-deal-complete https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/12/11662018/western-digital-...

washadjeffmad 6y ago

A little too much outrage for my taste. Every major HDD manufacturer was found offering SMR. WD was just the first to be held to task because they're so incredibly popular with shuckers. Seagate SMRs were found before WDs because we only purchased ≥8TB EasyStores, which are unaffected. For the lines they were supplied under, SMR characteristics don't impede 95% of customers. The rest are small-timers trying to avoid paying for warranties. No one buying Enterprise NAS was affected. edit: I guess we all decided to disagree by downvote today. Words tomorrow, maybe?

jschwartzi 6y ago
Actually I think you’re missing the point entirely. I have a 4 bay NAS that I use to back up all of my and my fiancé’s media so losing a phone isn't a catastrophe. I’m trusting that the NAS will actually rebuild in the event of a drive failure or it provides very little actual protection. WD shipped drives which were very unlikely to rebuild successfully. The upshot of that is that they lied to me and as a consequence have placed priceless data at risk from a drive failure. And had I known that I wouldn’t have bought their drives, so I’m materially harmed by it. I don’t shuck drives, I buy through retail channels like Newegg. I think you’re getting downvoted because you don’t understand the gravity of the problem and your victim blaming. Otherwise there’s nothing to disagree with because what you’re saying isn’t really supported in fact.
- washadjeffmad 6y ago
  Thanks for helping me understand the demographic affected. This isn't a rebuttal, but I hope you don't lose anything, so you should know that a NAS is not a backup. They provide redundancy and availability, but no number or type of disks will save your data from being lost in a fire or flood if you keep it all in one place. SMR drives, if you know what you're buying them for, are perfect for backups and write few, read many applications, which it kind of sounds like you want. They're not inferior or at premature risk of failure, just specialized. Also, I'm not saying you have no right to be unhappy with finding out why, but were you really dissatisfied with the performance of your NAS before these hyperbolic exposes went out?
6y ago

m463 6y ago

If only it had backfired for everyone when the marketing folks changed from hexadecimal capacity sizes to decimal. 1000000 = 1M

nayuki 6y ago
1,000,000 is exactly equal to 1 mega. It's the other part of the computer industry (Windows Explorer, RAM sizes) that abused the notation to pretend 1 kilo = 1024. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
mjevans 6y ago
My argument has been: Can I store just ONE byte at a time? Can I expand by singular bytes in a normal system? For hard drives, and even flash memory, the physical size of a sector converged, rather naturally, to a multiple of system word size, and since that had also converged to a power of 2, to a larger power of 2. Thus hard drives have sectors that were 512 bytes (4096 or '4Kbits'), and also why the smallest write available for modern drives is a multiple of 2. Binary is the native nomenclature of computers. It only makes sense that related equipment should also use the native (binary) engineering unit approximations as a result. Though for communications equipment, they do have variable sized packets, which even though computers generate 8 bit 'octet' based signals might technically be used by some other format that doesn't; and talking about the actual speed on the wire conveying that in maximum possible raw bit states is a tiny bit confusing when the rest are binary units, but it's less strongly wrong than a system where the lowest addressable (real) unit is binary based.
- nayuki 6y ago
  You're basically saying that prefixes like kilo- have a context-dependent meaning - usually 1000, but sometimes 1024. We know how well that worked out historically, right? e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ounce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ounce "the international troy ounce is equal to exactly 31.1034768 grams", "The international avoirdupois ounce is defined as exactly 28.349523125 g", "A fluid ounce (abbreviated fl oz, fl. oz. or oz. fl.) is a unit of volume equal to about 28.4 ml in the imperial system or about 29.6 ml in the US system". By not respecting the definition that kilo = 1000, you are deliberately sowing confusion and undermining the metric system as a simple, consistent, universal measurement system.

yellowapple 6y ago

Yeah, that move turned me from being a more-or-less diehard WD fan (i.e. picking it as my first choice for spinning disks) to being really skeptical of it; if they're willing to cheap out on that, then for me it casts doubt on the reliability of the hardware, too (and reliability is literally my only concern, even for my own desktops and laptops; WD could sell drives at a tenth of the performance as, say, a Seagate, but if it's even a little bit more reliable - which, in my observation from a variety of different use cases, it historically has been - I'll pick it every time). The good news is that I've basically stopped buying spinning rust, so this is more of a "well bummer" type of mood than an "oh shit I gotta scramble for a better primary vendor" mood. Even for server/NAS use I'm more likely to go for a Crucial/Kingston mix nowadays than I am for a WD/Seagate mix, both because SSDs have matured enough to be more reliable for a lot of things (less moving parts = less mechanical wear/tear and less sensitivity to vibrations¹, and with RAID a dying flash module is less of a "game over" moment - though things have gotten a lot better on this front, too) and because they perform a lot better (both in terms of speed and in terms of thermal/energy efficiency). ---- ¹: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

CyberDildonics 6y ago
For SSDs you can look at the individual components they are made from, like the controller boards.
esyir 6y ago
Unfortunately for bulk data storage, spinning rust is currently the only viable option at the consumer level. For now, until ssds reach competitive prices at the same scales, we're stuck with them.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  For how I typically lean for storage (RAID1 "cells" with each disk from a separate manufacturer, combined into either a RAID10 or a JBOD), and thus how I typically buy drives, SSD v. HDD is actually surprisingly close price-wise, especially when looking at 2.5" SATA or SAS (which is what I typically buy, both because 3.5" SSDs strangely don't exist and because I can stuff more of 'em into an enclosure; plus, quite a few servers don't even take 3.5" drives). For example, consider two different 2TB cell setups: - SSD: Crucial MX500 + Samsung 860 QVO = $473.73 on Newegg - HDD: WD Blue WD20SPZX + Toshiba L200 = $168.57 on Newegg On the one hand, the SSD cell is a whole 2.81× more expensive. On the other hand, the SSD cell is only 2.81× more expensive. This narrows to 2× in the case of a 1TB (well, technically 960GB in the SSD case) cell setup: - SSD: Crucial MX500 + Kingston A400 = $236.54 on Newegg (this is my typical setup for a RAID1) - HDD: WD Blue WD10SPZX + Toshiba L200 = $117.13 on Newegg Now, to be fair, this is excluding Seagate, which is stupidly cheap and would widen that gap (and historically I've bought Seagate strictly as a secondary for these sorts of "cells", but given my bad experiences with Seagate I'm inclined to ignore them and go with WD+Toshiba if possible for a given target size). It's also excluding 3.5" drives (and therefore notably excluding WD Reds entirely), which doesn't help for a 1TB cell (Seagate Cheetah NS + WD Red = $118.75) or a 2TB cell (Seagate IronWolf + WD Red = $167.74), but does help for bigger cell sizes that wouldn't be possible with 2.5" at all without major sacrifices in vendor redundancy and price (for example, a 4TB cell w/ Toshiba N300 + WD Red = $225.91, v. Samsung 860 QVO v. WD Blue = $1049.17 - even higher if I wanted to keep Kingston in the mix - or two of the above 2TB cells for only slightly cheaper). On the other hand, this is including 5400 RPM drives; if I required 7200 RPM (as most NAS drives are) then the 1TB cell cost jumps up to $134.98 (WD Black + Seagate BarraCuda), and if I needed 10k RPM or SAS then I'd probably be springing for a WD XE WD9001BKHG + Toshiba AL13SEB900, which would bring the cell cost up even higher to $164.75 (while also losing 100GB of capacity), or even higher to $186.38 if I wanted to swap the WD for a Seagate Savvio ST9900705SS and have that 64MB of cache on both sides of the mirror (thus bringing the cost difference to a mere 1.27×). I'm also artificially keeping out a whole swath of SSD manufacturers in the above figures; never heard of "Team Group" or "Goldenfir", but if I had zero qualms about reliability I could put together a 1TB cell with those for $182.98 (on par w/ the 10k RPM cell), or for a 2TB cell I could go with a Crucial BX500 + Patriot P200 for $399.98. ---- That all being to say: SSDs are a lot cheaper nowadays than they were even a couple years ago, and at typical consumer scales they're plenty viable; "good enough" capacity, while also having better performance and lower power consumption.