06-19-2020, 08:01 AM
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/31...n-nas-hdds
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.
...
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.