> Now I can be confident in what I'm getting when I buy a Western Digital drive. Good for them!
Are you confident that you'll get a drive that can work in a NAS when on the very same blog page they claim "WD Red HDDs are ideal for home and small businesses using NAS systems" and, indeed, on the data sheet[1], they claim that WD Red drives are "the hard drive of choice for 1 to 8 bay systems"?
At the very least they need to fix the data sheet; that's where I go to assess a drive's capabilities, not a vague blog post.
All this has done is shown me that WD are willing to repeatedly lie to their customers about things.
Just because they're no longer going to lie about this specific thing because they got enough bad press about it to force them to be honest doesn't mean they deserve any respect.
Hopefully Seagate and the other manufacturers that've been caught doing this will follow suit. It sucks to be a tech consumer buying expensive hardware like this and not feeling like you can trust the company selling it.
Which is precisely I was surprised when Western Digital's initial response didn't include a list like this one.
From my perspective as a consumer, WD has turned a disaster into an advantage. I now know that WD drives will disclose which technology they use—just like I know that Apple will bend over backwards to not secretly throttle battery performance. I can't say as much for other manufacturers.
> From my perspective as a consumer, WD has turned a disaster into an advantage.
I disagree. They explicitly denied it for months until the tech press started reporting on it. They showed nothing but contempt for their customers.
Edit: I’m never going to forget this: “Well the higher team contacted me back and informed me that the information I requested about whether or not the WD60EFAX was a SMR or PMR would not be provided to me. They said that information is not disclosed to consumers. LOL. WOW.“
They only used SMR without disclosing for general purpose drives... while bad, not as bad... their IronWolf and IronWolf Pro (NAS) drives are not SMR.
As I mentioned in another comment, equally pissed WD did this on (albiet smallest size) a Black label drive. WTF would they do this on their "high performance" segment is beyond me, and completely unreasonable.
No, Western Digital is the only one that advertised (and continues to advertise!) SMR drives as optimized for RAID. The drives are failing in RAID rebuilds, that's why this is getting press. Seagate and Toshiba are not using SMR in their NAS drives.
I disagree. These drives are not fit for installation into a RAID, and even being transparent about that doesn't fix the technical issues with SMR drives in that setting. And yet, WD is still explicitly advertising them for that purpose. From their site:
"Reliable
Designed to operate in the always-on environment of a NAS or RAID configuration"
So right now, today, they are steering people to buy these drives for an application that they are 100% not fit for. To me, that's still a disaster.
From my point of view, by doing the wrong thing initially, and then (especially) by persisting in it for so long, they've just turned a disaster into a bigger disaster.
I haven't walked away from this feeling like WD is fundamentally honest and open and can be trusted to disclose critical information without prompting; I walked away feeling like WD is fundamentally dishonest, and will lie even after being caught. "They stopped lying eventually!" is not a strong defense.
> I now know that WD drives will disclose which technology they use
Do you? I certainly don't. All I know is they have made, under extreme pressure, a once-off disclosure of unknown accuracy around their current drive models.
You appear to be under the mistaken perception that SMR drives are an appropriate product for some markets. SMR drives are not suitable for any market. SMR drives were supposed to cut costs by 25+%, but the savings never materialized. Instead, we now have a situation where products with a complete nightmare of a performance profile are being forced into consumers hands when an educated consumer would reject the product outright if they knew what they were buying.
Sorry, SMR HDDs are junk. The sooner the industry realizes that they're not suitable for any purpose, the better. Having a device where 4KB writes sometimes take seconds to complete is just plain unacceptable in 2020.
The highest capacity drives are not SMR, they're CMR. Why? Because nobody who stores large amounts of data wants to buy SMR drives. SMR drives are garbage and will continue to remain garbage. They're a dead end technology.
For those wondering why SMR drives are so bad, consider the following: SMR drives basically make the same trade-off that flash makes, but with a magnetic media that has a significant seek time and bandwidth penalty compared to flash. Any time a non-sequential write is made to an SMR drive, the whole "block" (which can be many megabytes in size) needs to be read from the disk into memory, written out somewhere else on the disk after which you can finally perform the equivalent of a flash sector erase and start writing data out sequentially again. The catch is that your hard drive can only perform sequential i/o at maybe 200MB/s vs the 3GB/s flash can. Flash sectors are also measured in kilobytes (128KB is a common size), while SMR "sectors" can end up being 16-128MB in size. Do the math. The latency is a disaster as we're talking hundreds to thousands of milliseconds of latency to do an erase. Flash can erase a sector in a millisecond, and you can have multiple erases occurring in parallel across multiple planes and dies. An SMR drive can have exactly 1 erase operation in flight at a time.
If SMR drives were of any value, you'd see them at the high end of the capacity spectrum. It's funny how those products don't seem to exist.
But we do use SMR drives at the high end of the capacity spectrum! Dropbox uses them heavily in their data centers[1], estimating that 40% of their data would be stored on SMR drives at the end of 2019.
Now, that's a data center, but don't consumers sometimes have similar cold-storage use cases? As long as they know what they're buying?
The reads like a fluff piece that just doesn't add up. Dropbox mentions testing 14TB SMR drives in the post from June 12 2018 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15457/western-digital-roadmap... . If I have a look on Amazon right now, the largest HDDs are 16TB CMR drives, not SMR.
Anandtech has a post based off of WD's press release from December 23rd 2019 here https://www.anandtech.com/show/15457/western-digital-roadmap... . The energy assisted MAMR drive is 18TB in capacity, while the SMR drive is 20TB in capacity. Where's the 25% capacity benefit? Shouldn't the SMR drive offer a capacity of 22.5TB?
Have a look at this https://www.anandtech.com/show/15457/western-digital-roadmap... article at Anandtech posted January 31st 2020. Note the side by side comparisons of projected growth of SMR drive capacity shipments. SMR growth projections are always right around the corner in the next 1-2 years. Why is this? Quite simply the market doesn't want SMR. Non-SMR technology continues to improve, eliminating SMR's capacity advantage after a period of time without SMR's orders of magnitude performance penalties.
If SMR was more than just a one time 25% capacity advantage it might be worth buying into. But it doesn't. It's a technology in search of a market that just doesn't exist because of all the downsides. HAMR and MAMR are the promising technologies to increase HDD capacity, not SMR.
Good point. I actually just discovered via a link in the TomsHardware article that the Seagate drive I purchased a couple weeks ago is, in fact, SMR. While I shouldn't have issues with it because my workloads aren't particularly write-heavy, this has definitely not helped my trust in Seagate.
> We will update our marketing materials, as well as provide more information about SMR technology, including benchmarks and ideal use cases.
I interpreted that to mean "Future SMR drives will disclose their use of the technology". We'll of course have to see whether follow through, but for now they're doing the right things.
Click through for the PDF on their site to confirm based on model numbers whether a drive will be SMR. The capacity-based list on their site seems to be for models in current production, but there are still plenty of "old" drives available with those capacities that are CMR. So be sure to look closely at the model numbers!
Anyway, this is all I wanted from them. "Here are what technologies each drive uses, and we'll be more transparent in the future."
Now I can be confident in what I'm getting when I buy a Western Digital drive. Good for them!