4 ms·

OTOH, Seagate never sold customers SMR drives mislabeled for NAS use.

whizzter 1y ago
Ugh, source on that? In the market for a new NAS/Homeserver soonish (realized my drives are almost at 10 years of power on time) and would like to have spinning rust behind ssd for larger storage.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  It was a whole thing a while back. This was maybe the original article, but once it landed this was the headline of all tech news for a couple of days. https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-magnetic-recording/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shin... SMR drives aren’t inherently bad, but you must not use them in a NAS. The may work well, up until they don’t, and then they really don’t. WD snuck these into their Red line, the one marketed at NAS users. The end result after a huge reputational hit was to promise to keep the Red Pro line on HMR, but the plain Red line is still a coin flip, AFAIK. I will not use WD drives in a NAS. It’s all about trust, and they violated it to as astonishing degree.
  - whizzter 1y ago
    Ugh, that's sad. The 10 year old drives for me are WD:RED's so can't complain about the old ones. Looking at the Pro/Plus PDF's it seems that they do specify CMR officially so sneaking in SMR disks sounds like lawsuit material. I'll probably go for them again, just be vary with research!
numpad0 1y ago
Not 100% sure about SMR situation, but granted, Seagate was never not technological front runner nor untrustworthy nor unfaithful company; their 5k4 drives were always more cost effective than anybody and they're the first to ship HAMR drives right now as well. It's __JUST__ that the MTBF was always statistically shorter.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  Which is a significant “just”, to be sure! But in my experience, if an Iron Wolf survives a RAID rebuild, it’s probably going to work for many more years. I’ve had 3 WD Reds claim to keep working, and still pass their SMART short and long tests, but tank in performance. I’d see the RAID usage graphs and all drives would be at like 5% IO utilization while the Red was pegged at 100% 24/7. The whole volume would be slow as it waited for the dying-but-lying Red to commit its writes. In each case, I yanked the Red and saw volume wait times drop back down to the baseline, then swapped in an Iron Wolf. Fool me thrice, shame on all of us. I won’t be fooled a 4th time. I’m not a Seagate fanboy. There’s an HGST drive in my home NAS that’s been rocking along for several years. There are a number of brands I’d use before settling for WD again. However, I’d make sure WD hadn’t bought them out first.

Ugh, source on that? In the market for a new NAS/Homeserver soonish (realized my drives are almost at 10 years of power on time) and would like to have spinning rust behind ssd for larger storage.

kstrauser 1y ago
It was a whole thing a while back. This was maybe the original article, but once it landed this was the headline of all tech news for a couple of days. https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-magnetic-recording/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shin... SMR drives aren’t inherently bad, but you must not use them in a NAS. The may work well, up until they don’t, and then they really don’t. WD snuck these into their Red line, the one marketed at NAS users. The end result after a huge reputational hit was to promise to keep the Red Pro line on HMR, but the plain Red line is still a coin flip, AFAIK. I will not use WD drives in a NAS. It’s all about trust, and they violated it to as astonishing degree.
- whizzter 1y ago
  Ugh, that's sad. The 10 year old drives for me are WD:RED's so can't complain about the old ones. Looking at the Pro/Plus PDF's it seems that they do specify CMR officially so sneaking in SMR disks sounds like lawsuit material. I'll probably go for them again, just be vary with research!

numpad0 1y ago

Not 100% sure about SMR situation, but granted, Seagate was never not technological front runner nor untrustworthy nor unfaithful company; their 5k4 drives were always more cost effective than anybody and they're the first to ship HAMR drives right now as well. It's __JUST__ that the MTBF was always statistically shorter.

kstrauser 1y ago
Which is a significant “just”, to be sure! But in my experience, if an Iron Wolf survives a RAID rebuild, it’s probably going to work for many more years. I’ve had 3 WD Reds claim to keep working, and still pass their SMART short and long tests, but tank in performance. I’d see the RAID usage graphs and all drives would be at like 5% IO utilization while the Red was pegged at 100% 24/7. The whole volume would be slow as it waited for the dying-but-lying Red to commit its writes. In each case, I yanked the Red and saw volume wait times drop back down to the baseline, then swapped in an Iron Wolf. Fool me thrice, shame on all of us. I won’t be fooled a 4th time. I’m not a Seagate fanboy. There’s an HGST drive in my home NAS that’s been rocking along for several years. There are a number of brands I’d use before settling for WD again. However, I’d make sure WD hadn’t bought them out first.