Tuesday, April 21st 2020
Western Digital Defends DM-SMR on WD Red HDDs, Points Users to WD Red Pro or WD Gold
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 discover 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.
"SMR is tested and proven technology that enables us to keep up with the growing volume of data for personal and business use. We are continuously innovating to advance it. SMR technology is implemented in different ways - drive-managed SMR (DMSMR), on the device itself, as in the case of our lower capacity (2 TB - 6 TB) WD Red HDDs, and host-managed SMR, which is used in high-capacity data center applications. Each implementation serves a different use case, ranging from personal computing to some of the largest data centers in the world.," Western Digital writes.
Western Digital explains that the WD Red family of HDDs were designed for smaller-scale home-office NAS applications - "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 on 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 a scale higher than mentioned), to consider WD Red Pro, WD Gold, or even Ultrastar enterprise HDDs.
Source:
Western Digital Blog
"SMR is tested and proven technology that enables us to keep up with the growing volume of data for personal and business use. We are continuously innovating to advance it. SMR technology is implemented in different ways - drive-managed SMR (DMSMR), on the device itself, as in the case of our lower capacity (2 TB - 6 TB) WD Red HDDs, and host-managed SMR, which is used in high-capacity data center applications. Each implementation serves a different use case, ranging from personal computing to some of the largest data centers in the world.," Western Digital writes.
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 a scale higher than mentioned), to consider WD Red Pro, WD Gold, or even Ultrastar enterprise HDDs.
42 Comments on Western Digital Defends DM-SMR on WD Red HDDs, Points Users to WD Red Pro or WD Gold
looks like backpedalling.....
smells like backpedalling.....
Guess what: it IS backpedalling....
Shame on you WD, tsk tsk tsk :(
I guess the time for enterprise-grade SSD storage has come. I was in doubt what to get - Ultrastar or some beefy SSD. Thanks for making it easier for me, WD (and all the rest of the liars).
I have no problem with the use of the technology, only that it should be disclosed along with performance specs. It's as simple as that.Not really. WD should have disclosed it, true, but it's not like its a design flaw. It's a type of recording tech that is used reliably and without fail.
They needed to clear the air more. Is it huge? No. But an SMR drive being a Red is a bigger deal than any other drive being SMR.
People are pissed off because it was being smuggled into a product that contained none before.
It should have been announced and clearly marked on a box.
This smells as another class-action lawsuit...
Hard drives really is a depressing tech ever since samsung sold their hdd branch
Do I think 20% capacity is worth it for destroyed random writes? personally no. Especially when its on a drive I know can be manufactured with CMR, and its only SMR to increase profits.
It is a bit like the QLC vs TLC arguments, QLC only offers a small increase in capacity, with some quite nasty downsides. Yet we getting consumers buying QLC drives because they naive to the technical changes (newer is better).
Just some examples: The WD Green 5400RPM drives were rebranded WD Blue. The old 7200RPM Blue drives are now pushed up to WD Black. The old dual-processor WD Black drives are gone as far as I can tell. Now they using SMR designs that were their lowest cost Archive drives and have bumped those up to Red.
Also the 4tb red I purchased around the same time is CMR also luckily.
www.dictionary.com/browse/flaw?s=tOpinion. Writes to disk of the truly "random" variety happen very infrequently and thus do not greatly affect overall performance. Contextual perspective is important.Writes, maybe, see above. Reliablity? Nonsense. SMR is perfectly reliable.Rubbish. SMR was announced almost a decade ago and very publicly. No one is "hiding" anything.
Take the tinhats off people and quit with the WD bashing, you're embarrassing yourselves..
On a side-note regarding the WD Green drives, I never knew they were rebranded Blue drives. Maybe I was distracted from the 'Intellipower' (variable RPMs) WD was mentioning with those drives, therefore assuming they were different drives altogether. Other than that they were the same as stated? Thanks.
ALSO, WD's original response when asked about the SMR Red drives was to deny that they even made SMR drives with the exception of their 20TB Enterprise drive that won't be in the consumer market. So yes, they are very much trying to hide that their drives use SMR.Crap, you reminded me that I had two 4TB Reds sitting on my desk that I just bought. I checked and both are SMR...fuck! Thank god I didn't try to deploy them into the RAID arrays. It probably would have failed during the OCE leaving the array degraded.
Plus there is the issues of OCE or ORLM, both of which would have very bad problems if you decided to add one of these new RED drives to an array. Can you just imagine someone who is running out of space on the RAID5 array, so they pick up another "matching" 4TB WD RED drive to expand their array, only to have the OCE fail and now they are sitting with a critical array with no redundancy until they get another 4TB drive to put in the array. Oh, so they think they just happened to get a bad drive, and return it for a new one, then that one fails too. They are left wondering why they keep putting in new drives only to have the OCE fail and their array sits critical one drive failure away from losing all their data. And since an OCE/ORLM is basically a rebuild, it has a higher chance of another drive dying during the process.It would be nice if it was always disclosed, but it only needs to be disclosed on products designed for RAID/NAS use.
Also note that Seagate has made a statement that they will never use SMR in a NAS/RAID product.When the issue was first brought to WD's attention a representative named Yemi Elegunde, an enterprise and channel sales manager for Western Digital UK, stated:It's in the original smartmontool's ticket.