04-22-2020, 07:49 AM
https://www.techpowerup.com/266101/weste...or-wd-gold
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.