Surreptitiously Swapping SMR into Hard Drives Must End

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zir_blazer

Active Member
Dec 5, 2016
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You are telling me that there are SMR based 2.5'' HDs in the 1 TB size under the WD Blue and Black branding? Just what the HELL are they smoking? I'm sure that you will see those horrible things rather often as the main storage of low end Notebooks aimed at clueless consumers that just buys based on price and don't even known what a SSD, much less SMR are, so they can't even make a reasonable decision about spending a bit more because the difference is justificable enough (Like, a day and night difference).

If you design something that will have WORSE performance than several previous generations of products, and aren't even getting the only benefit that was higher capacities, why bother on the first place? They shouldn't even manufacture these sizes to begin with and simply accept that SSDs will eventually drive the low end HDs out of the market. I'm even curious on how these days a highly precise mechanical device as complex as an HD is can be cost competitive with silicon... Or maybe they are corner cutting reliability, too?
I hope that SSD manufacturers completely crushes HD manufacturers bottom line. WD particularly already had a rather good ride during the plant flooding some 10 years ago.
 

SRussell

Active Member
Oct 7, 2019
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US
@Patrick SMR drives were introduced back in 2014. Most of the SMR drives offered today has a 3 year warranty. I went to WD's site and I was unable to locate a specification document that gives you a MTBF.

Do you have any stats on the failure rate of a WD SMR drive vs their Green, Blue or Black label drives? Does WD publish any information about the percentage of drives that are sent in for warranty repair/replacement?