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I believe the April 20th (bottom) section of this blog post is the post in question: https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/ https://blog.westerndig

I believe the April 20th (bottom) section of this blog post is the post in question: https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/ https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/ TLDR: They suggest different RED drives should be considered for different workloads. While that may have been their intention all along, that was not communicated well at in marketing or retail, where the drive colors (red, blue, purple, etc) used to be the appropriate method for selecting the right drive for your workload/purpose. The way they have worded it, the blog is not wrong, but they left out an important fact: consumers didn't have the necessary info to make the decision they're suggesting people should have made. Even if you read the data sheets that were available at the time, one would expect the listed transfer rate was a limit that the drive was capable of, not the rate that if exceeded would cause the device to perform very poorly. Worse, there would be no way to know that was the case because the fact that they were SMR technology was previously unreleased and the drives themselves actively hid that information from the host computer (since they were "device managed" SMR). The data sheets still aren't clear on how the performance is impacted with workload, but at least they're clear about the technology they use now.

simias 6y ago
>TLDR: They suggest different RED drives should be considered for different workloads. While that may have been their intention all along, that was not communicated well at in marketing or retail, [...] I would argue that it's worth than that because they sold drives with significantly different characteristics without changing the branding. It's not even that the users weren't given enough information to make an enlightened decision, it's that users of the older WD Red drives would reasonably expect newer models to basically fit the same performance profile. It's as if nvidia suddenly started selling GTX 2080 Ti cards that are effectively rebranded 1060 under the hood.
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  Absolutely. I just mean that even if consumers somehow guessed that something was different, and like you pointed out: they would have no reason to suspect that -- the information wasn't even available to decipher what that difference was. So, their cover story is completely asinine any way you look at it.

simias 6y ago

>TLDR: They suggest different RED drives should be considered for different workloads. While that may have been their intention all along, that was not communicated well at in marketing or retail, [...] I would argue that it's worth than that because they sold drives with significantly different characteristics without changing the branding. It's not even that the users weren't given enough information to make an enlightened decision, it's that users of the older WD Red drives would reasonably expect newer models to basically fit the same performance profile. It's as if nvidia suddenly started selling GTX 2080 Ti cards that are effectively rebranded 1060 under the hood.

bonestamp2 6y ago
Absolutely. I just mean that even if consumers somehow guessed that something was different, and like you pointed out: they would have no reason to suspect that -- the information wasn't even available to decipher what that difference was. So, their cover story is completely asinine any way you look at it.