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> This is very scummy. That's been my overall opinion of WD in recent years. I have been a supporter of WD since the 90s when I bought my first 2.5GB Caviar d

> This is very scummy. That's been my overall opinion of WD in recent years. I have been a supporter of WD since the 90s when I bought my first 2.5GB Caviar drive. My NAS and Server are filled with WD Reds and my gaming PC is using an WD Black NVME. I recently pulled WD Green and Blues from some systems and for the first time in 25 years used something other than WD to replace them. WD's branding use to make it really simple to understand what you were buying. You knew what Green, Blue, Red, Purple, and Black drives were capable of and you bought accordingly. Now it seems they're leveraging that trust and comfort to fuck people over and for what? How does disappointing your customer help your brand? I can no longer trust them and I'm not going to invest the effort to ensure that I'm buying the right Red or Blue drive from them. It's sad but I'm just going to take my money elsewhere.

ev1 5y ago
I stopped trusting them when they started silently hiding SMR in existing CMR SKUs and it only took massive backlash and public calling out for them to start selling "red" and "red plus" HDs. Blatantly lied about it while people have raid arrays failing and unable to rebuild, etc. edit: pro -> plus
- sigstoat 5y ago
  the red pro line significantly predates the SMR/CMR debacle. edit: or the plus did? well. they've successfully managed to confuse me, which was probably their goal. apologies.
  - cptskippy 5y ago
    A line Plus or Pro, was introduced as part of the fallout of the SMR debacle.
  - ev1 5y ago
    My bad, I was confused too Red pro: CMR, "remains the same" Red plus: the new CMR SKUs that were previously sold under the same models as CMR and mixed SMR SKUs Red: used to be CMR now SMR as far as I can tell
    - squarefoot 5y ago
      To shed some light on the matter (goto the last line for a Tl;Dr explanation): CMR:good for everything, and NAS+RAID use. You want this one pretty much for everything. SMR: good for light desktop work, very risky for NAS+RAID use. Older plain Red drives are CMR and therefore good, but check that their model string contains EFRX and not EFAX because WD at one point silently started shipping SMR drives labeled as WD Red, and the only difference was the model string, which contains EFRX for CMR (good) drives and EFAX for SMR (bad) ones. Be aware however that WD uses the model number in a very inconsistent way, for example there are new WD Red Plus models who have the EFAX designation, still are CMR drives, therefore good. Use it as indicator for older models, while newer models can be sorted out using their commercial name. Therefore, as of today: WD Red: those are mostly/all SMR drives. Avoid them. WD Red Plus: those initially were the old CMR WD Red ones, simply relabeled to show the difference. Good for everything. Newer ones have a different model string now which should imply some improvement besides a plain relabeling. They're still CMR and good. Those are what I'm currently using on my home NAS. WD Red PRO: those are high end CMR drives with better performance and durability standards than the Plus ones. Good for everything and indicated for heavy load situations. More costly however. Further details: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library... https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library... https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library... Yes, Plain WD Red drives are marketed as NAS drives; just ignore them. Tl;Dr: Avoid plain WD Reds, use Plus for low cost desktop or Home/SOHO NAS hardware, and Pro for more intensive uses.
      - userbinator 5y ago
        According to their model number decoder, the difference between --R- and --A- is the former is 5400RPM with 64MB of cache, and the latter 5400RPM with 256MB of cache. Unfortunate that they didn't change the part number to denote CMR vs SMR, and most people would rightly think that 256MB of cache is better than 64MB (but in this case it could be being used to hide the additional latency of SMR), so I think this is definitely in the area of deception.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
userbinator 5y ago
IMHO I prefer the detailed part numbers that WD used exclusively before they started using the dumbed-down colour scheme, because they give a lot more information than just "WD Black": https://i.redd.it/4sg8kvhe1nuy.png https://i.redd.it/4sg8kvhe1nuy.png Unfortunately I can't seem to find one for their SSDs, which is certainly a problem.

ev1 5y ago

I stopped trusting them when they started silently hiding SMR in existing CMR SKUs and it only took massive backlash and public calling out for them to start selling "red" and "red plus" HDs. Blatantly lied about it while people have raid arrays failing and unable to rebuild, etc. edit: pro -> plus

sigstoat 5y ago
the red pro line significantly predates the SMR/CMR debacle. edit: or the plus did? well. they've successfully managed to confuse me, which was probably their goal. apologies.
- cptskippy 5y ago
  A line Plus or Pro, was introduced as part of the fallout of the SMR debacle.
- ev1 5y ago
  My bad, I was confused too Red pro: CMR, "remains the same" Red plus: the new CMR SKUs that were previously sold under the same models as CMR and mixed SMR SKUs Red: used to be CMR now SMR as far as I can tell
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    To shed some light on the matter (goto the last line for a Tl;Dr explanation): CMR:good for everything, and NAS+RAID use. You want this one pretty much for everything. SMR: good for light desktop work, very risky for NAS+RAID use. Older plain Red drives are CMR and therefore good, but check that their model string contains EFRX and not EFAX because WD at one point silently started shipping SMR drives labeled as WD Red, and the only difference was the model string, which contains EFRX for CMR (good) drives and EFAX for SMR (bad) ones. Be aware however that WD uses the model number in a very inconsistent way, for example there are new WD Red Plus models who have the EFAX designation, still are CMR drives, therefore good. Use it as indicator for older models, while newer models can be sorted out using their commercial name. Therefore, as of today: WD Red: those are mostly/all SMR drives. Avoid them. WD Red Plus: those initially were the old CMR WD Red ones, simply relabeled to show the difference. Good for everything. Newer ones have a different model string now which should imply some improvement besides a plain relabeling. They're still CMR and good. Those are what I'm currently using on my home NAS. WD Red PRO: those are high end CMR drives with better performance and durability standards than the Plus ones. Good for everything and indicated for heavy load situations. More costly however. Further details: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library... https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library... https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library... Yes, Plain WD Red drives are marketed as NAS drives; just ignore them. Tl;Dr: Avoid plain WD Reds, use Plus for low cost desktop or Home/SOHO NAS hardware, and Pro for more intensive uses.
    - userbinator 5y ago
      According to their model number decoder, the difference between --R- and --A- is the former is 5400RPM with 64MB of cache, and the latter 5400RPM with 256MB of cache. Unfortunate that they didn't change the part number to denote CMR vs SMR, and most people would rightly think that 256MB of cache is better than 64MB (but in this case it could be being used to hide the additional latency of SMR), so I think this is definitely in the area of deception.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

userbinator 5y ago

IMHO I prefer the detailed part numbers that WD used exclusively before they started using the dumbed-down colour scheme, because they give a lot more information than just "WD Black": https://i.redd.it/4sg8kvhe1nuy.png https://i.redd.it/4sg8kvhe1nuy.png Unfortunately I can't seem to find one for their SSDs, which is certainly a problem.