WD, Seagate, Toshiba Sneak SMR Onto Hard Drives

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/30...-customers

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.
...
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.
...
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.