WD Red & avoiding the SMR pitfall

[brewmonkey]

Or buy another brand hard drive.

After seeing all this I went looking and was amazed to find there are basically no other 5400rpm NAS drives out there. For a large chunk of home NAS servers 7200rpm drives are not a good fit.

Sure hope somebody comes along and fills that gap...this seems like a golden opportunity.

 

[XeonLab]

In case you haven't noticed, they finally have come clean. However, I still wouldn't call this a good business practice and somehow this reminds me about Intel's adventures with non-soldered IHS'.

On WD Red NAS Drives - Western Digital Corporate Blog

https://blog.westerndigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/2020_04_22_WD_SMR_SKUs_1Slide.pdf

 

[TXAG26]

So I guess none of the higher capacity 8TB/10TB/12TB WD Red NAS drives have SMR?

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

So I guess none of the higher capacity 8TB/10TB/12TB WD Red NAS drives have SMR?

...yet. That WD thought it appropriate to put a RAID-hostile technology under a RAID-friendly marque (without even specifying it in the datasheets) displays exceptionally poor judgement, and their non-apology doesn't exactly fill me with confidence they won't expand SMR to other models in the future.

 

[i386]

All models from the red series that wd confirmed using smr are EFAX models.
It would be weird to use the same name scheme for drives using a different recording mechanism...

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

I think that's half the problem - WD aren't being transparent about it.

FWIW, I've got a bunch of the 10TB EFAX drives, specifically the WD100EFAX-68LHPN0 (oldest from 2-3 years ago), and none of them are SMR drives, at least as far as I can tell; none of them support TRIM or have large caches and their performance during heavy writes/rebuilds is adequate.

Even if WD were being transparent about it - SMR, at least in its current incarnation, doesn't belong in a range that's historically marketed towards general RAID usage IMNSHO. Random writes, sustained writes and especially parity rebuilds all seem catastrophic to performance.

 

[SRussell]

After seeing all this I went looking and was amazed to find there are basically no other 5400rpm NAS drives out there. For a large chunk of home NAS servers 7200rpm drives are not a good fit.

Sure hope somebody comes along and fills that gap...this seems like a golden opportunity.

The WD Red 8TB are still 5400rpm.

 

[SRussell]

SMR was introduced back in 2014. Does anyone have data points that highlights if the drive longevity is on par with equivalent CMR drives?

I am interested if equal size SMR Red has better or worse longevity vs their Blue, Green, and Black label drives.

 

[fossxplorer]

Has anyone with 14TB shucked last few months any suspicion about those being SMR as well?
As pointed out earlier, I would rather buy from some other vendor if there any with 5400RPM. IIRC there are 5700RPM drives, but whether they are approved for NAS/RAID usage I can't recall.

 

[msg7086]

SMR was introduced back in 2014. Does anyone have data points that highlights if the drive longevity is on par with equivalent CMR drives?

I am interested if equal size SMR Red has better or worse longevity vs their Blue, Green, and Black label drives.

Back to that time SMR was used only for archives. There were some reports saying they died pretty quick -- but that can just be individual cases.

Only in recent years did WD and ST silently put SMR into consumer drives, such as barracuda desktop and REDs. I'd love to see if someone has some data points.

 

[Patrick]

Just as a heads up (and shameless plug) we have some coverage of this on the STH main site: https://www.servethehome.com/surreptitiously-swapping-smr-into-hard-drives-must-end/

And for audio:

 

[Klee]

Just as a heads up (and shameless plug) we have some coverage of this on the STH main site: https://www.servethehome.com/surreptitiously-swapping-smr-into-hard-drives-must-end/

And for audio:

Great video .

 

[Markess]

After seeing all this I went looking and was amazed to find there are basically no other 5400rpm NAS drives out there. For a large chunk of home NAS servers 7200rpm drives are not a good fit.

As pointed out earlier, I would rather buy from some other vendor if there any with 5400RPM. IIRC there are 5700RPM drives, but whether they are approved for NAS/RAID usage I can't recall.

There may be others out there, but the only low RPM drives I've seen lately suitable for NAS (NAS Specific or Enterprise) are the lower capacity Seagate Ironwolfs. The standard Ironwolf (not Pro) are 5900 RPM up through 4TB. At 6TB they offer both a 5400 and a 7200 RPM model. Everything larger, and the entire Ironwolf Pro line, are 7200 RPM. Seagate has publicly stated that none of the Ironwolf are SMR (I think its mentioned in the main site post that @Patrick did as well)

Seagate also has some low RPM drives in their Skyhawk line (Surveillance). The product line includes both low RPM and 7200 RPM models so buyers would want to check which ones they're getting. Seagate has clarified, that for the drives 4TB and up, drives have essentially the same vibration sensors and mechanical as the Ironwolf, with only minor firmware differences. So, these may be an option for some as they're still rated for 24/7 and they go up to 8TB with 5400 RPM models.

Edit: Thought I'd clarify: What Seagate (Seagate_Surfer the offical Seagate presence on Reddit) actually specified was that that the Skyhawk drives with RV vibration sensors are essentially the same mechanically as Ironwolf. At this time, that's all the 4TB and above sizes: SkyHawk Surveillance Hard Drives | Seagate Canada

 

[brewmonkey]

The WD Red 8TB are still 5400rpm.

In the context of my reply, we were talking about manufacturers other than WD. It would be nifty to be able to vote with our dollars with another company...but the options are slim to none.

 

[brewmonkey]

Just as a heads up (and shameless plug) we have some coverage of this on the STH main site: https://www.servethehome.com/surreptitiously-swapping-smr-into-hard-drives-must-end/

And for audio:

This is the de facto SMR drive manifesto, right here. Fantastic.

 

[Markess]

In the context of my reply, we were talking about manufacturers other than WD. It would be nifty to be able to vote with our dollars with another company...but the options are slim to none.

At this point, I'm going to just stay away from WD. I've not liked their approach for quite some time. Head parking issues with Greens and even some Blues & Reds, changing firmware just to prevent people from adjusting parking intervals themselves, their misleading statements about drive speeds when Intellipower came out, and now this is just icing on the cake.

But, I've got pretty modest requirements and I can live with 6TB Ironwolfs from Seagate. Anyone that needs/wants larger capacities though is definitely stuck ATM.

Maybe one of the other vendors (hopefully you're listening Seagate and Toshiba) will see this as an opportunity.

 

[i386]

Western Digital raising HDD prices - report

Digitimes sources say Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) will raise prices for its enterprise hard disk drives by more than 10% due to high costs and low...

seekingalpha.com

After admitting that they use smr in "raid"/"nas" drives wd will increase the prices for their "actual" raid/nas drives...

 

[Evan]

Western Digital raising HDD prices - report

Digitimes sources say Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) will raise prices for its enterprise hard disk drives by more than 10% due to high costs and low...

seekingalpha.com

After admitting that they use smr in "raid"/"nas" drives wd will increase the prices for their "actual" raid/nas drives...

push everybody to an all flash future, maybe they want to just make a much cash as they can while winding down production of spinning things (except maybe the really big enterprise ones)
not much competition or many options out there now.

 

[brewmonkey]

Flash is nifty but I think it will be quite some time before we see it come within range of replacing mainstream home lab/NAS requirements (i.e. those of us with finite budgets...hehe).