Western Digital SMR Drives: the class-action lawsuit and the performance impact

Do you own any misrepresented WD SMR Drives?

  • Yes, lets sue their asses

    Votes: 11 26.8%
  • Yes, but the performance doesnt affect me

    Votes: 2 4.9%
  • No

    Votes: 26 63.4%
  • Maybe

    Votes: 2 4.9%

  • Total voters
    41

KarateBob

Gawd
Joined
Aug 4, 2004
Messages
805
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/29/wd_class_action_lawsuit/

theregister said:
A US law firm is seeking owners of certain shingled Western Digital drives to join a class-action suit against the storage slinger, alleging the manufacturer didn't document its use of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) in kit aimed at RAID arrays.


Hattis Law today revealed it is looking for plaintiffs in the US who bought the affected drives to back its case over allegations regarding undocumented shingling in WD Red NAS hard drives, as well as some of its Blue and Black drives. Given the relative slowness of SMR drives, they aren't really suitable for write-heavy RAID work, though WD is accused of advertising them for just that purpose.

You might be asking yourself how bad is this performance, and is it worth the minute of hassle it takes to fill out a class-action lawsuit form? Will at Servethehome performed a great comparison and even recorded a video about it, for those who prefer it

https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/




Update May 31st: Canada gets a class-action suit too
https://ca.topclassactions.com/laws...g-class-action-lawsuit-over-hard-disc-drives/
 
Last edited:
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like this
Well it also sends a message to the company.
I guess I am just pessimistic. Used to be a bank examiner and I would see all the wrong that the big banks would do: money laundering, violating state and federal bank laws, consumer laws, etc. The banks were fine with paying the fines to the government and regulatory agencies as long as no criminal charges against anyone in management with promises to "do better", then years later the same story. They just wait and new management comes in and they decide to break the laws because they are not accountable. So what is the "message". The fines are less than the profits they make and nobody is held "legally" accountable.
 
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/29/wd_class_action_lawsuit/



You might be asking yourself how bad is this performance, and is it worth the minute of hassle it takes to fill out a class-action lawsuit form? Will at Servethehome performed a great comparison and even recorded a video about it, for those who prefer it

https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/




KarateBob can we get an option for "Maybe" I don't know because they haven't disclosed all the information completely still
 
Well it also sends a message to the company.


That already happened when they posted the model numbers.

If you bought these and didn't notice the performance impact, you're likely network-limited on most drive transfers (highly-unlikely your average US internet connection AND local network tops 40MB/s download).. In that case, it's not going to affect you, and this lawsuit is pointless.

For those with RAID arrays, you already noticed the moment you installed the things, and taken advantage of Amazon's 30-day return policy.. WD has simply done you the grace of giving us all the current model numbers(so you can know what to expect now!)

I recently received a WD 2TB 2.5" USB 3 driver that has SMR, but since I only use it for overnight media drive backups, adding a couple hours to the backup tinme doesn't really affect me (as long as it's done by morning, it's identical experience for me). But I will have to research my next media drive purchase. (currently RED 2TB, not SMR)

WD will probably lose my next media drive purchase to another brand, if they want me to upgrade to Red Pro. To me, that lost media PC/small business server business is going to hurt them a lot more han some small lawsuit.
 
WD is the new Boeing aka 737Max. WD knew full damn well about this and tried to hide it until they got called out. WD got greedy just like Boeing and now they will pay the price.
 
I have a Seagate 6TB SMR drive and it is awful after about 40-50GB of continuous writes. I ended up using Microsoft Storage Spaces and combining it with some other drives just to offset the speed issue. But you can still see the up/down swing of transfer speed on large backups.

If your goal is to put movies on a drive and play them back, like a media library, then they are ok. Especially if you are only adding 1-2 movies at a time.
 
doesn't effect me and honestly don't care because the only people that win are the lawyers.. it won't do a damn thing to change anything.
 
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