WD quietly starts putting SMR in consumer Red drives

From an arstechnica article, WD official statement:
All our WD Red drives are designed to meet or exceed the performance requirements and specifications for common and intended small business/home NAS workloads. WD Red capacities 2TB-6TB currently employ device-managed shingled magnetic recording (DMSMR) to maximize areal density and capacity. WD Red 8-14TB drives use conventional magnetic recording (CMR).
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Mav451 said:
While I don't have firsthand experience with those SAS drives in the CDW thread, I believe those are a good alternative.

H/T to Samir for posting this in that thread - $220 for 12TB SAS
https://www.cdw.com/product/seagate-12tb-sas-7.2k-256mb-3.5in-hd/6003290?pfm=srh

Downside is that these listings come and go, so if you're trying to bulk order a dozen at a time, no guarantee you get these kind of prices.
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Hmm. I dont know if I really want to chance buying used drives in those large sizes, especially enterprise ones. We know that enterprise use is much harder on the drives.
 
LurkerLito said:
From an arstechnica article, WD official statement:
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That's good information to know, but it makes me wonder how long it will be before they similarly sneak SMR into higher density drives? If they didn't tell us the first time, I'd imagine they're liable to do it again.

EniGmA1987 said:
Hmm. I dont know if I really want to chance buying used drives in those large sizes, especially enterprise ones. We know that enterprise use is much harder on the drives.
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Yes, but generally enterprise drives have significantly better durability than consumer drives and also generally massive server rooms are more cared for than general consumers cases (IE: their HD's will generally be kept at reasonably cool temperatures).
With all things YMMV. But I would say that most of the time drives are rotated out long before it's even close to their end of life. Heck that link was for 12TB drives, which are still relevant even in an enterprise environment. They weren't introduced that long ago in the market. I think 18TB is the top right now?
 
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I always lacked respect for WD and their shitty marketing>engineering corp culture, and once they got their paws on HGST - who had the best drive engineers on the planet but lacked in marketing/distribution - all truly felt lost.

Of course, Seagate has been peddling SMR junk for eons so it's not like there are many alternatives.

It's the deceptive marketing and carefully crafted spec sheets that are most annoying. Like they know that listing SMR will piss people off so they make a decision to obfuscate and be vague, and use doublespeak when asked for clarification. How about take some pride and own it.

Edit:
"You are correct that we do not specify recording technology in our WD Red HDD documentation."
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Shitheads.
 
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I have zero beefs if they sell and market SMR drives based upon what they are. A (potentially) good value for low-throughput cases. That word "Archive" seems to make sense for those.

Just indicating WD Red now means "may pretty much suck at performance" is redefining an existing product, with existing expectations. Call it Red2 or WD Pink or something, but come on. People buy Reds for what Reds have traditionally been.
 
PhaseNoise said:
Just indicating WD Red now means "may pretty much suck at performance" is redefining an existing product, with existing expectations. Call it Red2 or WD Pink or something, but come on. People buy Reds for what Reds have traditionally been.
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WD Red's were created from their lowest line of products, the Green. They're just Greens with TLER support. Let's not make these drives out to be something they're not, they're not a replacement for enterprise drives. There's a reason why they're used as white labels, WD uses these drives across the board in all of their cheapest offerings. If WD is going to make the switch to SMR, it makes perfect sense that they'd start with their bottom of the barrel products but they should also reflect these changes in the specs.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Yeah, I regret not writing the models down. If I had predicted how slimy the hard drive industry would become, I'd have been more vigilant documenting it.
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Someone on Reddit or somewhere will document this sleaziness.
I'd be surprised if the manufacturers won't be forced to report what drives are smr in the future.
This whole debacle is unbelievable.
 
Jim Kim said:
Someone on Reddit or somewhere will document this sleaziness.
I'd be surprised if the manufacturers won't be forced to report what drives are smr in the future.
This whole debacle is unbelievable.
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considering they all do it not just WD, it won't happen any time soon because in the grand scheme of things the only people that care are the minority.
 
You're thinking of the Red Pro (7200RPM).

The initial 5400RPM Reds were considered only slightly higher tier than the Greens - and I bought them specifically b/c they didn't default with head-parking behavior. At the time, I was also looking for specifically 1TB/platter hard drives. With the 2TB Red, you were gambling on getting either a 667GB/platter or 1TB/platter model. But WD made a change so that even Reds had the same, over-aggressive head-parking behavior, and I never bought another one again.

WD has a history of making odd, well frankly, bad decisions. The WD Blue line used to be a cheap, easy way to get 7200 RPM drives for non-Black prices. But then they stopped releasing 7200 Blue models above 1TB. There's a supposed 2TB model - per the HDD platter blog (scroll down to WD20EZEX), but it's not easy to find.
 
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Ironically, this topic made me remember I had one WD RED 4TB 64MB lying around so I hooked it up and formatted it. It's now my game disk, I've got no idea but I've unloaded my games and moved them over from my SSD to the 4tb drive. I've played a few games and the loading time is a bit slower, noticeable, but nothing non-bearable. I've got no idea if it's an SMR or CMR drive and is there anything specifically that I should be worrying about at for my general purpose of it being my game storage?
 
Jon855 said:
I've got no idea if it's an SMR or CMR drive and is there anything specifically that I should be worrying about at for my general purpose of it being my game storage?
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64 MB drives don't have SMR. There's no issues using those older drives as general storage. A newer SMR drive would not work, you'll have all sorts of issues.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
64 MB drives don't have SMR.
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There are reports you can't use the cache size. I don't know how true that is. Supposedly a better metric is "does the device support TRIM?" If it supports TRIM, it's SMR, because regular CMR hard drives don't need TRIM. I'm not sure what tools you use to check that, though--the only hard drives I have these days are a couple of Reds I bought more than a year ago for a Synology NAS, and they're CMR.
 
1_rick said:
There are reports you can't use the cache size. I don't know how true that is. Supposedly a better metric is "does the device support TRIM?" If it supports TRIM, it's SMR, because regular CMR hard drives don't need TRIM. I'm not sure what tools you use to check that, though--the only hard drives I have these days are a couple of Reds I bought more than a year ago for a Synology NAS, and they're CMR.
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SMR drives require large caches to work properly, which is why the cache got bumped up to 256MB. 64MB would be almost unusable due to cache thrashing from the "housekeeping" functions of having to write back destroyed track data.
 
aokman said:
I would be beyond pissed if I had just built a new array of their drives and cant even stream a 4K lossless movie :ROFLMAO:

I think the Ultrastar DC are still basically HGST drives but I hate giving any money to those WD or Seagate bastards.

Toshiba is a great buy if you can find them.
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The downstream speed is fine for 4K Lossless. It’s just the write speed that sucks. Actually write speed isn’t even terrible. It’s the rewrite speed that is.
 
Video going over this for your entertainment.

He brings up a good point that people are buying these to rebuild RAID sets and apparently it's causing issues.



Jon855 said:
Ironically, this topic made me remember I had one WD RED 4TB 64MB lying around so I hooked it up and formatted it. It's now my game disk, I've got no idea but I've unloaded my games and moved them over from my SSD to the 4tb drive. I've played a few games and the loading time is a bit slower, noticeable, but nothing non-bearable. I've got no idea if it's an SMR or CMR drive and is there anything specifically that I should be worrying about at for my general purpose of it being my game storage?
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In general a hard drive is going to load slower than a SSD. Hard drives actually perform quite well if you are not using them for your OS drive (a lot less IO). SMR drives are fine in situations where you are not writing a lot of data. So using them to store games or movies or pictures, etc is perfectly fine. They are a great value for that because those situations are mostly read oriented.
 
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Western Digital has "responded" here, if you can even call it that: https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/

Very much a non-response. They advertise Red Pro and Gold drives as an alternative (sleazy move) and in such a way that they're saying "consumers should have known to use our other lines for more intensive usage requirements". They want informed consumers but then don't disclose their drive technology in specs? Ugh

No apology, admission of anything (I mean, legal-wise that makes sense). No coming clean about the fact that they were selling SMR drives as RAID/NAS drives and obscuring the fact that the drives were SMR, which will often fail in RAID rebuilds. They say SMR helps with higher capacities- but please note their higher capacity Red drives aren't even SMR so that's a contradiction.

Just all around a gross double-down. I expected better.
 
Additionally, some of you have recently shared that in certain, more data intensive, continuous read/write use cases, the WD Red HDD-powered NAS systems are not performing as you would expect.

If you are encountering performance that is not what you expected, please consider our products designed for intensive workloads. These may include our WD Red Pro or WD Gold drives
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Basically. Fuck you go buy a more expensive drive.

I thought the pro drives were also SMR?
 
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xx0xx said:
Western Digital has "responded" here, if you can even call it that: https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/

Very much a non-response. They advertise Red Pro and Gold drives as an alternative (sleazy move) and in such a way that they're saying "consumers should have known to use our other lines for more intensive usage requirements". They want informed consumers but then don't disclose their drive technology in specs? Ugh

No apology, admission of anything (I mean, legal-wise that makes sense). No coming clean about the fact that they were selling SMR drives as RAID/NAS drives and obscuring the fact that the drives were SMR, which will often fail in RAID rebuilds. They say SMR helps with higher capacities- but please note their higher capacity Red drives aren't even SMR so that's a contradiction.

Just all around a gross double-down. I expected better.
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F off, what a pisstake. Well thats another manufacturer off my list purely on principle.
 
Seagate was so close to getting their response right. At least all of their NAS drives are CMR.

It's fine with me if they believe SMR is okay for desktop use- but they still submarined them into their desktop lineups without disclosing it. So instead of differentiating them, they created a same-cost-to-consumer, lower-cost-to-self, lower-performance desktop part and didn't disclose it.

Buying an HDD these days apparently is just a battle of finding the "least sleazy" company, since apparently they all are.
 
xx0xx said:
Seagate was so close to getting their response right. At least all of their NAS drives are CMR.

It's fine with me if they believe SMR is okay for desktop use- but they still submarined them into their desktop lineups without disclosing it. So instead of differentiating them, they created a same-cost-to-consumer, lower-cost-to-self, lower-performance desktop part and didn't disclose it.

Buying an HDD these days apparently is just a battle of finding the "least sleazy" company, since apparently they all are.
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toshiba, WD, and seagate all use unmarked SMR drives using the same model names that use to be CMR drives. but it's no different then even the SSD market where some label their shit as 3D nand, some don't. some don't say if it's MLC, TLC or QLC NAND, some remove the dram cache on drives that once use to have it or cut the dram cache in half without ever saying it.. $$$ before honesty..
 
WD Easystore / WD Elements "Shuck-able" drives started their popularity at 8TB+ so in theory this wouldn't affect them, but I'm seeing suggesting that some white label drives are being used in these from 8TB - 14TB are SMR? Also, how can you check? I don't know if it has an easy field in Linux commands or Windows applications (ie CrystalDiskInfo etc) that will spit out if the drive is using SMR either.? I can't imagine they'd make all of these drives this way considering that some of the WD white labels are essentially not just WD Reds, but also WD Golds and/or HGST He8's or He10's and I can't imagine those could ever use SMR.

This is very frustrating as I was in the process of looking for a few more "Shuck-able" WD drives be it new or used, so if this is another concern - much less one not easily detected either via the specs on the box or worse the drive being connected and inspected etc.. thats serious.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
toshiba, WD, and seagate all use unmarked SMR drives using the same model names that use to be CMR drives. but it's no different then even the SSD market where some label their shit as 3D nand, some don't. some don't say if it's MLC, TLC or QLC NAND, some remove the dram cache on drives that once use to have it or cut the dram cache in half without ever saying it.. $$$ before honesty..
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I do think sometimes manufactures don't advertise that info due to people obsessing over a detail or spec just because it's something they have some knowledge of, even if it won't result in a real-world advantage to their workload. The issue comes in situations where you do have a genuine need for a spec but you have difficulty buying it because of that lack of advertising.
 
Not sure how this video got recommended to me on YouTube from someone but he runs some benchmarks and shows the downside of SMR drives.

 
bigdogchris said:
SMR drives are fine in situations where you are not writing a lot of data. So using them to store games or movies or pictures, etc is perfectly fine. They are a great value for that because those situations are mostly read oriented.
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Games are not in the same category as movies and pictures. Many games do a lot of I/O in the background and cause SMR drives to fall flat on its face. The shitty WD SMR drives I had a year ago would cause long pauses while loading and stuttering in game.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Games are not in the same category as movies and pictures. Many games do a lot of I/O in the background and cause SMR drives to fall flat on its face. The shitty WD SMR drives I had a year ago would cause long pauses while loading and stuttering in game.
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I'm not aware of games that are doing a lot of writing back to their install directory during game play. But if you say so.
 
It doesn’t matter what metric you use to justify their performance, this is a bait and switch tactic by WD when consumers are paying a premium and expecting higher durability and performance for NAS use.

With NAS solutions becoming more user friendly, WD are trying to prey on users who won’t know what they are buying and just read the label. SMR offers nothing for the consumer other than higher profits for the manufacturer.

Complete bullshit and they deserve everything they have coming to them. I had a few big NAS builds coming up for clients and I have switched brands for all of them.
 
bigdogchris said:
I'm not aware of games that are doing a lot of writing back to their install directory during game play. But if you say so.
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DRM schemes, updates and game clients (Steam, etc) faffing around with files all the time. I've had to diagnose weird perf issues with Source engine games before and using diskmon showed them doing all sorts of file I/O constantly.
 
kju1 said:
Well now I know which drive brand to not buy ;)
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But which brand are you going to buy instead? It's mainly just Western Digital and Seagate now.

The last 7 drives in a row that I've had fail on me were all Seagate. Even with SMR, I'm not sure that I would buy a Seagate over a Western Digital. HGST had been by-far the most reliable for me, but of course, WD bought them. I'm not sure if WD just fired everyone at HGST or to what extent they were able to integrate that excellence into their company. Obviously SMR is a big fail on Western Digital's part that it seems like they tried to sneak in, but I think I'd still rather have an SMR Western Digital drive than a Seagate that dies in <5 years.
 
GotNoRice said:
But which brand are you going to buy instead? It's mainly just Western Digital and Seagate now.

The last 7 drives in a row that I've had fail on me were all Seagate. Even with SMR, I'm not sure that I would buy a Seagate over a Western Digital. HGST had been by-far the most reliable for me, but of course, WD bought them. I'm not sure if WD just fired everyone at HGST or to what extent they were able to integrate that excellence into their company. Obviously SMR is a big fail on Western Digital's part that it seems like they tried to sneak in, but I think I'd still rather have an SMR Western Digital drive than a Seagate that dies in <5 years.
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The Ultrastar line is just rebranded HGST as far as I know. That said I hate Seagate also but I will say the 8 x 8TB Ironwolf drives in my server have been rock solid.

Toshiba are also very good and underrated, I put them up there just under HGST, they seem very.....similar.
 
GotNoRice said:
But which brand are you going to buy instead? It's mainly just Western Digital and Seagate now.

The last 7 drives in a row that I've had fail on me were all Seagate. Even with SMR, I'm not sure that I would buy a Seagate over a Western Digital. HGST had been by-far the most reliable for me, but of course, WD bought them. I'm not sure if WD just fired everyone at HGST or to what extent they were able to integrate that excellence into their company. Obviously SMR is a big fail on Western Digital's part that it seems like they tried to sneak in, but I think I'd still rather have an SMR Western Digital drive than a Seagate that dies in <5 years.
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I used to love WD. Then I got 2 drives in a row that didnt last more than a year and they refused to honor the warranty. For my personal PC I use seagate. I have drive run times approaching 8 yrs before failure. On the professional side I used to run a large hadoop cluster with over 10k spinning disks...our seagate drives lasted 4x longer than the WD/HGST ones did. Toshibas fell apart in about a month.

Backblaze issues stats that Ive found useful on which models to get.
 
zehoo said:
I guess all their usb drives that people shuck will now be SMR.
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This is a concern, but in theory given the sizes officially listed, that shouldn't be the case. Shuck-able drives traditionally started at 8TB and now go up through 10TB, 12TB, and currently max out at 14TB (I don';t think 16TB has yet reached the market). If they are being truthful that only smaller drives less than 8TB seem to have a chance of being SMR, then the shucking community seems to be safe -a t least in theory. Now, the concern is that they do not apply the same standard parameters to their labeled internal WD Reds etc... to the "white label" drives inside of WD Elements / EasyStore externals.
 
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