Quote:The problem with SMR drives is that when you overlap the tracks like this, it means that there’s no way to write to just a single track without affecting the data on nearby tracks. Writing data to an SMR drive requires that the drive scan multiple tracks at once and then rewrite them. There’s a significant performance penalty for doing so, and that’s not the only issue with SMR drives. Users have complained that SMR drives are so slow, you can’t use them when rebuilding a ZFS array, and that you can’t create a RAID array if you add an SMR drive to it. There are very good reasons, in other words, why customers need to know if they’re buying an SMR drive.

Western Digital disagrees. The company is shipping SMR drives in its WD Red family without disclosing this fact. Customers have already been burned by the swap. If you’ve already used PMR-based WD Red drives in your RAID array, attempting to include SMR drives may not work at all. According to Western Digital, the 8-14TB drives they sell are all based on PMR, while the 2TB-6TB parts are all SMR drives. The performance difference between the two is significant, with the 2TB -6TB drives in the 150MB/s to 180MB/s range, while the 8TB-14TB drives run at 198MB/s to 215MB/s. While SMR drives are cheaper to manufacture than PMR drives, none of the savings is being passed on to customers as far as we can tell.

WD isn’t the only company lying by omission as far as which HDD tech its hard drives use. A number of drives in Seagate’s Backup Plus family are also reportedly using SMR instead of PMR, and again, they aren’t disclosing this fact to customers.
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Western Digital and Seagate both need to make it clear when their products use SMR and to communicate to customers that these products may not meet their performance or compatibility needs. The difference between PMR and SMR isn’t academic. The two drive technologies are not equivalent, either in terms of compatibility or performance.
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Update (4/16): It isn’t just Seagate and Western Digital pulling this crap. Toshiba has been caught doing it as well, except Toshiba is selling these drives in the consumer P300 desktop line, where they are completely unsuited. Seagate is also selling these drives in consumer products, with both updates provided by Blocks and Files. If you needed a reason to dump hard drives for SSDs, this would be it, right here. If these three drive manufacturers can’t be bothered to tell consumers when they are buying hard drives blatantly unsuited to the task of driving a consumer system, I see no reason why anyone should ever buy a spinning hard drive again, from any vendor.

I don’t like being lied to.

Quote:Western Digital gave its first response to allegations of the company implementing SMR (shingled magnetic recording) on its WD Red internal hard drives without properly documenting it. The WD Red series is extensively marketed as being "NAS optimized," which caused many NAS and RAID DAS enthusiasts to pick it up for home-office use, only to discovers that the company's implementation of drive-managed SMR (DM-SMR) makes them effectively unfit for RAID use, as DM-SMR is vital for some of the higher-capacity WD Red models to achieve their nameplate capacity, while coming at a heavy cost of random write performance.
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Western Digital explains that the WD Red family of HDDs were designed for smaller-scale home-office NAS drives - "one to eight bays" in scale, with workload rate of 180 TB/year. The company states that the drives have been tested and validated by major NAS manufacturers - a response to the SMR controversy blowing up of NAS manufactrurers' support forums.

Western Digital was vague about how it plans to make up to aggrieved WD Red users. It points them to their support site, stating "We know you entrust your data to our products, and we don't take that lightly. If you have purchased a WD Red drive, please call our customer care if you are experiencing performance or any other technical issues. We will have options for you."

The company pointed serious NAS customers (applications of the scale higher than mentioned), to consider WD Red Pro, WD Gold, or even Ultrastar HDDs.

Quote:Today the company updated its blog with a more conciliatory tone, and also disclosed all of its drive models that are shipping with SMR tech. In addition to the WD Red NAS drives that the company previously admitted used SMR tech, WD is also shipping the tech into its 2.5"and 3.5" WD Blue and 2.5" WD Black lineups. Both models are designed for desktop PCs and laptops, with the former coming as a value drive while the latter is designed for high-performance users.

Quote:Selling an SMR drive in the WD Black line is an insult to the product. When Western Digital created its initial color-based branding, WD Black hard drives were supposed to sit at the top of the stack, surpassed only by the Velociraptor family. Putting an SMR product in that stack is Western Digital’s way of quietly acknowledging that hard drive performance is a dead letter category since SSDs became widespread. The WD10SPX is the only offender in this category, the WD5000PLX, 3200LPLX, and 2500LPLX are apparently unaffected.

I’m not opposed to SMR drives. They boost capacity, can reduce power consumption, and offer a larger capacity in the same number of platters. The performance tradeoff is worth it in certain markets and irrelevant in others. No argument. But these parts didn’t just magically appear in WD’s product lines in the first place. A decision was made to swap one technology for another, and a decision was made not to tell consumers about the change. At least in the case of the WD Red family, there’s evidence those changes weren’t evaluated as closely as they should have been.

We are glad to see Western Digital has chosen to be honest about its product shipments. It needs to continue to update these charts as it introduces new products to let customers know what they’ll be buying if they choose an SMR drive. Using SMR instead of CMR is fine. Not telling people about the difference isn’t.

Last week, I said I would not recommend a hard drive from any vendor until companies were more transparent about their product mixes. So long as Western Digital continues to inform customers where SMR drives are and are not being used, I have no problem recommending products from the company.

Quote:Unfortunately, because Toshiba is selling these drives in bulk, it may be difficult to make certain you aren’t buying one. ExtremeTech does not recommend using an SMR drive in a consumer system as primary storage unless you are specifically aware of its likely performance characteristics and do not mind them. The dramatically lower write performance that SMR offers in some instances is of less concern for personal backup drives or similar applications, but hard drives are already poor solutions for storage speed compared with SSDs, and SMR drives are lower than CMR (conventional magnetic recording) in several additional aspects.

We are glad Toshiba came forward with this information, but we can only recommend buying a system with a Toshiba HDD if you either know exactly what you’ll be getting into or can confirm you aren’t buying an SMR drive.

Quote:The lawsuit, filed by Hattis Law, alleges that Western Digital shifted to SMR drives to save money with no regard for the performance impact this would have on its customers or the fact that it would render the drives “completely worthless for their intended purpose” (emphasis original).
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ServeTheHome’s tests show that the EFAX drive might work in a desktop context, but it has no place in a RAID array. The fact that Western Digital is explicitly advertising the SMR-equipped EFAX family as suitable for this purpose is tantamount to false advertising. It might not matter if you use an EFAX drive as storage for a video camera feed, but these drives clearly have major problems in RAID arrays.

Western Digital has not commented on the situation, but it continues to sell SMR WD Red drives into this space. We recommend staying away from any products in the WD Red line-up with the EFAX model number — use EFRX drives if you’re building a RAID array on these products.

Quote:Update 5/30/2020 7:20am PT: Top Class Actions has also opened a lawsuit against WD in Canada, portending a broader spate of class action lawsuits against WD globally.

Quote:Western Digital continues to face fallout for its decision to ship shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs in NAS products. The law firm suing the company has updated its filing to add significant technical data and is not requesting a huge payday for itself. Instead, the plaintiffs ask that Western Digital be forbidden from advertising SMR drives as being suitable for NAS applications.
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Western Digital has stayed silent on this issue for months, now. While the company did post a list of which of its drives were SMR and which were CMR, it continues to ship SMR drives as drop-in replacements for scenarios they are demonstrably unable to fulfill. The company has not changed its messaging and it hasn’t changed its products.

There’s a real problem here. Western Digital advertises Red as the NAS line. It does not advertise Red as “The hard drive family where some of our drives are universally compatible, and some of them aren’t!”

Probably a good thing, that.

If you must use WD Red, look for the EFRX family of hard drives — these are the CMR products. If you know that your NAS is compatible with SMR products, by all means, feel free to use them. But if Western Digital doesn’t take some kind of action to more meaningfully clean up these problems, I wouldn’t continue to buy the company’s products. Further investigation has shown that WD has actually been stealth-shipping drives like this since at least 2018, and the company’s end-users have been trying to explain that this is a serious problem for at least that long.

I would not consider an SMR drive in a RAID array unless you have a specific reason to believe the drive will function properly. The price difference between the CMR and SMR drives is not big enough to make the headache worth it.

Quote:Western Digital’s solution to the problem is to create a new tier of products, dubbed “Red Plus.” Going forward, WD Red will be a three-tiered system. All SMR hard drives will be sold as ‘Red,’, while the CMR drives that formerly populated the Red family will be rebranded as “Red Plus.” The Red Pro family will not change.

Personally, I would’ve preferred keeping CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) drives as ‘Red’ and labeling the new SMR drives something else, but WD wants to retain the fiction that it hasn’t just bait-and-switched the entire Red product family by dumping the onus to learn about the difference on its own customer base. Customers who currently own CMR WD Red drives will have to intuit the need to replace them with Red Plus drives when the existing models fail.
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Western Digital states this problem occurred because “The explosion of data seen today has spawned a spectrum of NAS uses cases, as well as increasingly demanding applications.” I don’t find this to be an acceptable or credible explanation, and I don’t think you should either. The problem I have with WD’s statements on this topic is simple: It’s literally the manufacturers’ job to make certain that its purpose-marketed hard drives perform excellently in the hardware it is intended to operate in. ZFS not playing nice with SMR is very much a known problem. It just (somehow) wasn’t known to WD.

WD claims to perform extensive validation testing on various NAS arrays, which makes it sound like ZFS configurations might have just fallen through the cracks. But this kind of early evaluation is exactly what WD is expected to perform, and data from iX Systems — a vendor WD specifically references working with on its blog — shows that WD didn’t perform that validation process correctly. From iX Systems:

Quote:At least one of the WD Red DM-SMR models (the 4TB WD40EFAX with firmware rev 82.00A82) does have a ZFS compatibility issue which can cause it to enter a faulty state under heavy write loads, including resilvering…

In the faulty state, the WD Red DM-SMR drive returns IDNF errors, becomes unusable, and is treated as a drive failure by ZFS. In this state, data on that drive can be lost. Data within a vdev or pool can be lost if multiple drives fail.

WD has been shipping these hard drives since late 2018. Complaints have been stacking up the entire time. What WD appears to have done is to assume customers would magically know that their drive-managed SMR implementation had problems with ZFS. There was no prominent marketing material or guidance published by the company to guide people away from SMR drives and towards CMR if they intended to use ZFS, at least not until now. There was no specific data on the dramatic performance difference that can arise between SMR and CMR HDDs, as shown by ServeTheHome:

WD claims to be listening, but states, in the very next paragraph: “The DMSMR drives met all of our test requirements.”

The only thing that statement tells us is that WD’s test requirements aren’t thorough enough. Telling me “these drives meet test requirements” when the drives are failing in end-user deployments isn’t a defense, it’s an indictment. It should be noted that this issue has been assumed to impact all SMR drives in certain NAS arrays. WD is the only company selling SMR drives into these systems, but the firmware issues iX Systems raises means that some problems could theoretically be caused by (or improved by) firmware updates. This appears to be a complex question, however, and the fundamental way SMR drives perform write operations means they can’t match CMR drive performance in certain tasks. Firmware could improve things, but only to a certain point.

I don’t disagree with Western Digital’s claim that SMR drives can handle some degree of NAS workloads and configurations, but this problem should never have happened in the first place. If you intend to use ZFS, you’ll want to buy Red Plus or Red Pro drives — or maybe hard drives from a different vendor altogether.