Read more.Quote:
And it is updating web pages, marketing materials with SMR tech info, benchmarks etc.
Printable View
Read more.Quote:
And it is updating web pages, marketing materials with SMR tech info, benchmarks etc.
They should also do a replacement program for the Customers who have made purchases but do not wish to have an SMR drive when they were expecting a CMR drive.
I don't think they should get away with this "subtle" change.
The WD blue column on that table, arguably the most purchased branding, doesn't exactly clear things up lol....
Also wouldn't mind knowing about their enterprise HGST ultrastar range.. I know it has smr in the branding on the larger (14-20TB) drives but it doesn't say anything on the lower size drives.
I mean the whole thing is a bit bizarre but a WD Black drive too? Seriously?
I'm surprised that they introduced SMR into their Red range which are meant for NAS use. Last time I checked, SMR drives seriously hindered RAID rebuild times because once their initial burst write from their cache wears off, the write speeds dropped significantly to the tens of megabytes per second range.
I guess it's a good thing my FreeNAS build is using Seagate Ironwolf drives. I mean, they were cheaper than WD Reds at the time but they're more expensive now and it looks like I now know why the Reds have gotten cheaper...
Well being that WD has more balls then Seagate who still lying out there teeth by call it TGMR when it really just SMR which are very bad for steam game library I know I have 8TB Barracuda with error, may my next drive will be an WD
Indeed.
This may interest you then;
https://arstechnica.com/information-...-smr-dont-mix/
Good for WD. It sucks that it took this controversy to actually make something happen but whatever. Hopefully SSD's price per GB will continue to drop and in a few years spinning rust won't matter anymore.
Damage is done for those that know..
error
TDMR isn't the same thing as SMR though they may be used together. Do you have any links for us to check out?
Quite. This gets on my wick, although it could be worse. I was about to proactively replace a pair of 2.5" WD Black drives that are used in a write-intensive, mission-critical application and are just about to go out of warranty. Now I'm wondering whether 'new' Black drives will be a suitable replacement. I guess the age of stock on shelves comes into it too. Something of a lottery created has been.
Regarding the manufacturing date lottery - it has similarities to the bait-and-switch some SSD manufacturers have pulled over the years; release a drive that gets decent reviews, then a while later replace it with different/cheaper components resulting in considerably worse performance. It's wholly unacceptable.
In this case, the Black line is marketed as the high performance line, as you would expect from the substantially higher price typically seen on these drives. You really don't expect to be playing a model-number lottery with this line.
A while back you had the standard blue line, the green line which was typically lower-rpm drives, then the 'faster' black drives. The green drives all but disappeared and the blue line became a model number lottery instead, whether you got a 7200rpm or slower drive.
The real issue is that WD were my go to manufacturer after having consecutive issues with Seagate but now with them owning each other and the drive you think you are getting not being the drive that you paid for it doesn’t leave the consumer in a good place.
I can't remember the details exactly now but I think that while WDC wanted to buy Hitachi, there were competition concerns so part of Hitachi including some manufacturing facilities had to be sold to Toshiba (who already had a 2.5" business) to maintain three competitors in the market. Seagate had already bought Samsung's drive business so it would have meant going from four to just two remaining players in the 3.5" drive space. I'll post back with links if I find clarification.
Edit: That was easier to find than I expected: https://www.anandtech.com/show/5635/...hitachi-buyout
Class action law suit about this issue filed in US:
"Hattis Law has filed a lawsuit against Western Digital Corporation alleging that Western Digital secretly switched many of its hard drives, including its WD Red NAS hard drives, to inferior shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology, deceiving and harming consumers."