Sunday, May 31st 2020
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Western Digital Sued Over Undocumented SMR on Certain WD Red HDDs
Western Digital has been hit by a class-action lawsuit over alleged false advertising over some of its WD Red hard drives featuring undocumented DM-SMR (drive-managed shingled magnetic recording), a physical layer data writing technique that maximizes capacity at heavy costs of random write performance, that effectively render the drives unfit for RAID applications that are common with NAS setups. Trouble brewed for Western Digital in April, as a Blocks & Files report exposed presence of SMR on certain popular WD Red drives as an explanation as to why the drives couldn't be added to RAID volumes.
Western Digital initially tried to defend its position by explaining what DM-SMR is, that the standard WD Red has been tested on most SOHO NAS devices, that they're not meant for serious (> 8-drive) NAS setups; and pointing people to their pricier WD Red Pro, or enterprise-segment Ultrastar HDDs, leading to more community backlash. Days later, Western Digital finally came out with a list of its HDDs that use SMR. Bellevue Washington-based Hattis & Lukacs, class-action specialists, are leading the charge against Western Digital, and are inviting aggrieved U.S. residents to join the class.
Source:
Arstechnica
Western Digital initially tried to defend its position by explaining what DM-SMR is, that the standard WD Red has been tested on most SOHO NAS devices, that they're not meant for serious (> 8-drive) NAS setups; and pointing people to their pricier WD Red Pro, or enterprise-segment Ultrastar HDDs, leading to more community backlash. Days later, Western Digital finally came out with a list of its HDDs that use SMR. Bellevue Washington-based Hattis & Lukacs, class-action specialists, are leading the charge against Western Digital, and are inviting aggrieved U.S. residents to join the class.
28 Comments on Western Digital Sued Over Undocumented SMR on Certain WD Red HDDs
I discovered what they were doing through user reviews. Many people don’t like user reviews, but they have their place, like this situation.
The thing is SMR doesn't make random writes that much worse in real world use for a normal user. I have an SMR Seagate drive, and if I didn't tell you it was SMR, you'd probably never know. Benchmarks can reveal it, but even then some don't really. For a standard single drive in a system, the CMR cache built into the drive is enough to absorb any writes to the drive without much slowdown, so the user never notices. However, the problem comes when you put a SMR drive in RAID, and a rebuild or OCE/ORLM causes huge amounts of data to be written to the drive, and the CMR cache gets full. Then write performance just drops off a cliff.
www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/3-5-barracuda-3tbDS1900-10-1710US-en_US.pdf
Thank you WD and Seagate for your help with my decision - no way i'm giving money to scumbags that sell expensive "RED" or "Ironwolf" drives with same tech as the cheap consumer HDDs. Samsung, Adata, Sandisk or Kingston will get my hard earned money instead.
P.S. just checked my current backup drive - one year old 4 TB Barracuda drive ST4000DM005, apparently it's not SMR, but its write speed (30MB/s average writing from a SSD) is slower than my 5-year old 2TB WD Green (acheved 35-50 MB/s copying the same files connected to the same SATA port)!
People can't sue if they don't have all the facts. Now they do and they will sue. Regardless of how many naysayers like you dismiss this issue on gaming forums. Im sure there were people who defended Nvidia too when the whole 3,5GB fiasco started. Or the Apple battery nerfing on older phones. Both of which resulted in class action lawsuits.
www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-lists-all-drives-slower-smr-techNOLOGY
www.techspot.com/news/84973-wd-publishes-complete-list-smr-drives-following-user.html
www.extremetech.com/computing/309730-western-digital-comes-clean-shares-which-hard-drives-use-smr
Also 8TB and above WD Red drives should be CMR so as long as you buy an 8TB, 10TB, 12TB or 14TB WD Red you should be fine.
IDK if Purples are SMR but I have many of them and they work just fine year after year in various harsh environments.
www.techpowerup.com/266207/western-digital-spells-out-which-specific-hdd-models-use-smr
www.techpowerup.com/266207/western-digital-spells-out-which-specific-hdd-models-use-smr#g266207-1
www.techpowerup.com/266207/western-digital-spells-out-which-specific-hdd-models-use-smr#g266207-2