WD Red & avoiding the SMR pitfall

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lofie

New Member
Jul 12, 2013
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At least they are somewhat honest compared to Seagate & WD. Also, kudos to Blocks and Files for doing the research.
gotta second this sentiment! - shingle-gate !

@WD - for smaller drives - why oh why oh why would you do this!!!!

This just sends shivers down my spine! We run raid 6 on wd 8tb reds, but intend to move to raid 1 as the cost benefits are slowly disapearing with the much larger drives. We cared more for cost per TB than performance during a resync. But this gets me really concerned - especially for a NAS grade drive - where you know it will be used in raid 6 in many cases.

Anyone heard about the 8/10/12TB usb drives?
 

mackle

Active Member
Nov 13, 2013
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I was going to expand my pools of 6TB reds.

Oh well, guess I will just have to go with bigger drives...
 

Andy Barclay

New Member
Apr 17, 2020
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Man, I was pissed when I read this....
But I've got some anecdotal evidence that perhaps it isn't horrible.
I had a readyNAS that I replaced with a synology in 2013. I just backed up and moved the drives to the synology and recreated the volume and file system. It had 2 hitachi 2 TB drives at the time. I added 2 WD RED 2 TB drives.
It should be noted that this is a general purpose NAS which hosts VMs for ESXi and acts as surveillance storage so I'm assuming lots of random writes.
One of the hitachi drives has since died - replaced with the WD RED 4 TB drive. The volume was expanded by adding another WD RED 4 TB drive. Finally, last week, one of the WD RED 2 TB drives started throwing IO errors so I forced the hot spare (seagate iron wolf 4 TB) to replace it.
That failed WD 2 TB drive had been running for 5.7 years before it failed. I still have one Hitachi 2 TB that has been running for 8.6 years.
Here is the thing. After nearly 6 years, of constant writes, I'm not really upset about having to replace the drive. It's pretty much time to replace it anyway. (The hitachi is just an anomaly where I'm trying to see how long it will run). After 6 years, the marginal utility of keeping a 2 TB unit running is suspect.
Anyway, I'm less angry now - but I still wish they had disclosed it.
 

Andy Barclay

New Member
Apr 17, 2020
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Maybe I missed the point, but what does your story have to do with SMR?
I do see where my post was unnecessarily wordy...
TL;DR
WD RED 2 TB ran for 6 years with random writes.

I thought the biggest complaint against the WD RED 2,4, and 6 TB drives was that the SMR reduced the lifetime of the drive. If that isn't the concern, and the performance meets the numbers they advertise, then I'm not sure why folks are upset.
 
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alex_stief

Well-Known Member
May 31, 2016
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That WD RED drive you have been using for 6 years is not an SMR drive though. So I still don't get your point.
 

PigLover

Moderator
Jan 26, 2011
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I do see where my post was unnecessarily wordy...
TL;DR
WD RED 2 TB ran for 6 years with random writes.

I thought the biggest complaint against the WD RED 2,4, and 6 TB drives was that the SMR reduced the lifetime of the drive. If that isn't the concern, and the performance meets the numbers they advertise, then I'm not sure why folks are upset.
Just doing random writes is not the problem. The "DM" (device managed) part of DM-SMR deals with this as long as your rate of writes does not go faster than their caching/management of actual writes to the drive can handle.

The problem comes up during recovery/resilver - especially when recovering data to a replacement drive in a Raid-5/6 (or RaidZ 5/6) pool. In that case you get a massive number of writes to the replacement drive that are often not done as one big sequential stream. That is where this was discovered - drives dropping out of pools during recovery/resilver activities. That is also when the problem would be most insidious because you've believed you had data protection but when you need it most it fails you in ways that risk damaging the entire pool.
 
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Andy Barclay

New Member
Apr 17, 2020
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That WD RED drive you have been using for 6 years is not an SMR drive though. So I still don't get your point.
I just checked. You are absolutely correct. My 2 TB drives are EFRX while the SMR ones are EFAX.

Now I'm worried about the two 4 TB WD drives in my Synology. I'm now pissed off again :)
 

Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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i think anyway all spinning disks will be now focused on price and capacity. Performance less so as they are really just archive storage. Excepting some EMC Isilon or ECS type solutions for big storage i haven't seen spinning disks used in enterprise almost at all (boot disks for ESX servers, some small systems that just need a bit of capacity).
Summary is i see this happening more and more. (Shame as 14/16tb PMR would be a nice backup pool)
Safe bet for performance is right now be using used (or new) HGST 7200rpm enterprise helium drives. 8TB are very common, granted much cheaper in SAS format than SATA.
 

nikalai

Member
Oct 26, 2018
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Also there are some rumors that N300 are HGST rebranded drives.

I bought WD Book 14TB when it was on sales on Amazon UK and i was thinking to return it when i heard regarding SMR thing but it seems to be ok...
 

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Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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Probably nobody buying 2-6tb cares about performance as they would use SSD for that capacity if they want it fast. I know it’s being driven all by cost saving for the drives but the only people this really hurts is those looking for replacement drives for existing arrays.
Of course it’s a shit thing to hide from people but they probably figured hardly anybody would even raise an eyebrow.
 

msg7086

Active Member
May 2, 2017
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Evan, that's not so true. SSD runs at 500MB/s+, regular HDD runs at 150MB/s. But for SMR drives, if you try to torrent on those drives, you get merely 10MB/s after a few minutes, and your system becomes lagging due to super high latency I/O on those drives. I'm perfectly fine with even an IDE drives that runs at 60MB/s, but 10, no. The record I saw from seagate 8TB SMR was 750KB/s writing speed at torrenting, max out.
 

Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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Torrent on SSD is the easy answer for not much more $$ than those small drives.