FYI: Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording

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abstractalgebra

Active Member
Dec 3, 2013
182
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MA, USA
Wow disappointing for WD. Perhaps many NAS use cases are very light but when that does not occur you have a mess. Anyone had issues related to this and under what load?
 

amalurk

Active Member
Dec 16, 2016
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You suck WD and I hope you get to waste time and money on a class action. Although it will only likely be a pittance of compensation for users it will hopefully make you disclose this type of customer last change in the future.

It is unfortunate that the law is unable to keep up with this kind of tech trickery. States have weight and measures laws so you cannot market a pound or whatever of something and then give the customer less than promised. What WD did is exactly akin to that, they promised fitness and performance for a particular use and then later secretly made a change to customers' detriment.
 
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BLinux

cat lover server enthusiast
Jul 7, 2016
2,669
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artofserver.com
You suck WD and I hope you get to waste time and money on a class action. Although it will only likely be a pittance of compensation for users it will hopefully make you disclose this type of customer last change in the future.

It is unfortunate that the law is unable to keep up with this kind of tech trickery. States have weight and measures laws so you cannot market a pound or whatever of something and then give the customer less than promised. What WD did is exactly akin to that, they promised fitness and performance for a particular use and then later secretly made a change to customers' detriment.
well, we can only resort to public shaming at this point... share across all social media... LOL
 
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tsteine

Active Member
May 15, 2019
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It should be noted it's specifically the latest iteration, "such as the latest iteration of WD REDs (WDx0EFAX replacing WDx0EFRX)"
I nearly had a heart attack seeing this given that I have a ZFS array of 24 2TB wd reds.
 

maanval

New Member
Feb 11, 2020
5
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Belgium
Good to finally have some clarity on this issue. I don't particularly like WD's patronizing tone when they talk about 'typical workloads' - as if a ZFS RAID is such an odd use case for a small business or enthousiast user. Their answer also seems to imply that the drives are meant for off-the-shelf NAS enclosures only (like QNAP and Synology), though their product page merely mentions that the drives are optimized for "NAS systems" and "RAID environments", which could very well include a whitebox ZFS backup server.
 

niekbergboer

Active Member
Jun 21, 2016
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Switzerland
In bird culture, we call that... Well, anyway. I seem to have dodged to bullet (6 EFRX'en here).

There is nothing wrong with SMR drives as such. In fact, once host-based SMR becomes a thing, and ZFS on Linux has support for them, they will make for great drives. Not knowing that you drive is SMR, while it masquerades as CMR to your OS, that is foul play if you ask me.