Wednesday, June 24th 2020
Western Digital Comments Some More on WD Red Hard Drives
We want to thank our customers and partners for your feedback on our WD Red family of network attached storage (NAS) hard drives. Your real-world insights shared through in-depth reviews, blogs, forums and from our trusted partners are directly contributing to our work on an expansion of models and clarity of choice for customers. Please continue sharing your experiences and expectations of our products, as this input influences our development.
Due to the fact that the range of use cases for NAS has become increasingly diverse, we are now making it easier for users to match the right drive with their applications and workloads - from moderate small office/home office (SOHO) workloads to intensive small- and medium-business (SMB) use, as well as more demanding environments.
The WD Red Family
Here's a breakdown of our products for NAS use-cases:
From our experience, we see most SOHO users rely on their systems for office file sharing, home backup or content archiving. Throughput and idle time are key considerations in these types of SOHO workloads. As explained in our post on DMSMR, as well as in media reviews, these drives prefer idle time to perform background operations, without which the drive may take longer to complete a command. Our use-case analysis shows that SOHO workloads typically are based on short periods of access to the drives. This results in extremely low average throughput (compared with the drive's available throughput) and provides plenty of idle time for the DMSMR drive to perform the necessary background operations, making it an ideal fit for this application.
From a sequential performance perspective, our tests confirm that our WD Red DMSMR drives are on par with our existing CMR drives. Third-party testing also validates the performance of WD Red DMSMR drives compared with other drives under general hard drive benchmarks used in an NAS environment.
In a RAID rebuild scenario using a typical Synology or QNAP (non-ZFS) platform, WD Red DMSMR drives perform as well as CMR drives or show slightly longer RAID rebuild times, depending on the condition of the drive and extent of rebuild required. While test results can vary from one methodology and test bed to the next, we acknowledge that in some cases DMSMR, for the idle-time reasons covered earlier, can result in slower rebuild times.
For Users with Workload-intensive Applications and ZFS: CMR
The explosion of data seen today has spawned a spectrum of NAS uses cases, as well as increasingly demanding applications. One of those includes use of ZFS, an enterprise-grade file system. The increased amount of sustained random writes during ZFS resilvering (similar to a rebuild) causes a lack of idle time for DMSMR drives to execute internal data management tasks, resulting in significantly lower performance reported by users. While we work with iXsystems on DMSMR solutions for lower-workload ZFS customers, we currently recommend our CMR-based WD Red drives, including WD Red Pro and the forthcoming WD Red Plus.
We're listening.
In addition to taking customer and partner feedback seriously, we conduct in-house testing on the WD Red family of drives for compatibility, performance, endurance and other factors. These drives typically have been validated for compatibility on many platforms from NAS manufacturers such as Synology, QNAP, Asustor, Buffalo, Netgear and Thecus. The DMSMR drives met all of our test requirements, and we're actively working with system makers like Synology to ensure use cases are validated for customers.
As a leader in HDD and flash technologies, we are committed to addressing the evolving needs of our customers and to offering the right technology for each implementation. This philosophy launched WD Red drives years ago, and they have been a leader in their field ever since. We continue engaging customers and partners and analyzing real-world data to offer a family of WD Red NAS drives - from HDDs to SSDs - that serve all workloads and applications.
Due to the fact that the range of use cases for NAS has become increasingly diverse, we are now making it easier for users to match the right drive with their applications and workloads - from moderate small office/home office (SOHO) workloads to intensive small- and medium-business (SMB) use, as well as more demanding environments.
Here's a breakdown of our products for NAS use-cases:
- Our current device-managed shingled magnetic recording (DMSMR) (2 TB, 3 TB, 4 TB, and 6 TB) WD Red series will be the choice for the majority of NAS owners whose demands are lighter SOHO workloads.
- WD Red Plus is the new name for conventional magnetic recording (CMR)-based NAS drives in the WD Red family, including all capacities from 1 TB to 14 TB. These will be the choice for those whose applications require more write-intensive SMB workloads such as ZFS. WD Red Plus in 2 TB, 3 TB, 4 TB and 6 TB capacities will be available soon.
- Our WD Red Pro (CMR 2 TB to 14 TB) series for the highest-intensity usage remains the same.
From our experience, we see most SOHO users rely on their systems for office file sharing, home backup or content archiving. Throughput and idle time are key considerations in these types of SOHO workloads. As explained in our post on DMSMR, as well as in media reviews, these drives prefer idle time to perform background operations, without which the drive may take longer to complete a command. Our use-case analysis shows that SOHO workloads typically are based on short periods of access to the drives. This results in extremely low average throughput (compared with the drive's available throughput) and provides plenty of idle time for the DMSMR drive to perform the necessary background operations, making it an ideal fit for this application.
From a sequential performance perspective, our tests confirm that our WD Red DMSMR drives are on par with our existing CMR drives. Third-party testing also validates the performance of WD Red DMSMR drives compared with other drives under general hard drive benchmarks used in an NAS environment.
In a RAID rebuild scenario using a typical Synology or QNAP (non-ZFS) platform, WD Red DMSMR drives perform as well as CMR drives or show slightly longer RAID rebuild times, depending on the condition of the drive and extent of rebuild required. While test results can vary from one methodology and test bed to the next, we acknowledge that in some cases DMSMR, for the idle-time reasons covered earlier, can result in slower rebuild times.
For Users with Workload-intensive Applications and ZFS: CMR
The explosion of data seen today has spawned a spectrum of NAS uses cases, as well as increasingly demanding applications. One of those includes use of ZFS, an enterprise-grade file system. The increased amount of sustained random writes during ZFS resilvering (similar to a rebuild) causes a lack of idle time for DMSMR drives to execute internal data management tasks, resulting in significantly lower performance reported by users. While we work with iXsystems on DMSMR solutions for lower-workload ZFS customers, we currently recommend our CMR-based WD Red drives, including WD Red Pro and the forthcoming WD Red Plus.
We're listening.
In addition to taking customer and partner feedback seriously, we conduct in-house testing on the WD Red family of drives for compatibility, performance, endurance and other factors. These drives typically have been validated for compatibility on many platforms from NAS manufacturers such as Synology, QNAP, Asustor, Buffalo, Netgear and Thecus. The DMSMR drives met all of our test requirements, and we're actively working with system makers like Synology to ensure use cases are validated for customers.
As a leader in HDD and flash technologies, we are committed to addressing the evolving needs of our customers and to offering the right technology for each implementation. This philosophy launched WD Red drives years ago, and they have been a leader in their field ever since. We continue engaging customers and partners and analyzing real-world data to offer a family of WD Red NAS drives - from HDDs to SSDs - that serve all workloads and applications.
25 Comments on Western Digital Comments Some More on WD Red Hard Drives
FYI WD, Da Rock can smell what you've been smokin, and it REEKS like hell.... hehehehe :D
And FYI #2, I use WD Black m.2's in all 6 of my rigs and they are great IMHO, so I'm only bashing them because I don't agree with the recent revelations about their current HDD's...
And back in the day, I used their 10k Raptors exclusively...those were some sweeeet drives !
This pretty much follows their pattern of rebranding lower quality/performance drives at higher tier products. They rebranded the WD Green drives as WD Blue, the older Blue drives moved up to Blacks. And the old school really nice fast Black drives are gone.
The color system was a pretty good way to tell consumers what the drive was intended for, but WD has totally f'd it up to the point it is worthless now.
I personally would increase the number to more like 7 - 10, for good measure.
I just don't have the budget for the professional CMR drives at +300€ ranges so these should do. SMR is really like only for data that keeps sitting for very long time which is infact what I'm doing, archiving, but if write speed is so slow then I'd be making my archives for 3 months, I don't have that time to sit around and spin wheels sorry, plus I move my archives around other archival drives, update and replace files with newer versions, recoded ones (video transcoding), use it for temporary files, etc so I would be doing a bunch of writing operations.Exactly.
The color tiers got totally mixed up now, post 2018 there's no more green line, lowest is blue, CMRs, if they're actually better than old greens I don't really know at this point.
I got WD40EZRZ now, which is the new blues, I don't think they're exactly the same old greens but they probably would be in the green category so they kinda count as green, but they're CMR so I got this one, I can confirm it's not SMR, I got it on purpose just to test (plus I need more data anyway and I'll put less important stuff on these green/blues)
However ... this whole thing is already at least showing some results even before the trial actually started, ... so the old classic RED line is being phased out of the CMR 2-3-4-6 TB sizes ... but thankfully it's combing to the RED Plus line, so that's encouraging, the price of SMR has to go down, not the price of CMR going up, which is kind of what usually happens when cheaper techs get introduced it kinda bumps existing stuff up as this is a common corporation practice, but we'll see.
In 2010, an all-time high of ~650 million HDDs were shipped.
Less than a decade later (2018) that number has nearly halved to ~375 million.
By 2022 it's expected to be under 300 million units per year.
Hard drive sales, particularly in the consumer market, are tanking as SSD capacities come up and prices come down. HDD manufacturers can see that the light at the end of the tunnel is a train coming straight for them, so they're doing their level best to exploit what's left of their market while they can.
SMR and all these other clever tricks are only delaying the inevitable. By the end of this decade I expect HDDs to be viewed in the same manner as tape drives of yesteryear.
They aren't marking them as anything... That's honest and clear...
Context is important. Observe;
- not really a Red, but you pay for one anyway;
- not really a Red again, but you pay extra for a desktop-class with CMR;
- actual Red for real NAS usage, but you pay a kidney for one, just because profit margins;
This seems like an excuse to charge more for these lower quality drives.