Seagate and WD quietly introduce SMR drives, says report

[HEXUS]

SMR can be a problem if you are building a storage system for write-intensive workloads.

Read more.

[[GSV]Trig]

Not good for RAID either, probably a way to separate NAS drives and Gold/Enterprise drives perhaps?

[edmundhonda]

SMR is garbage. There's a usecase in long-term cold/near cold data storage and that's basically it. Selling it unlabelled is miserable; selling it for use in a NAS (and lying about it when questioned!) is unacceptable.

I bought a 6tb Red last year, my 12th WD Red drive. I won't buy another.

[[GSV]Trig]

I was looking at a 6 or 8tb WDRed as my next drive, furlough has meant me going through all my backups and such and getting rid of duplicates and old files, so I've gone from 3Tb of free space to over 6Tb, so I don't need a drive at all now, which is good given this coming out of the woodwork...

Tom's Hardware got the following from WD.

"All our WD Red drives are designed meet or exceed the performance requirements and specifications forrubbishcommon small business/homerubbishNAS workloads.rubbishWe work closely with major NAS providers to ensure WD Red HDDs (and SSDs) at all capacities have broad compatibility withrubbishhostrubbishsystems. Currently, Western Digital’s WD Red 2TB-6TB drives are device-managed SMR (DMSMR).rubbishWD Red 8TB-14TB are CMR-based."



Thats the important bit, so 8tb> are good still...

[Yoyoyo69]

Doesn't surprise me one bit.

Seagate have been a joke a long time a d Western Digital have longed to be as bad for years.

Unfortunately they bought up the competition so they cuould fix prices and control the market.

If it wasnt for the emergence of ssd, who knows what state we'd be in.

Just hope that they don't gain a strong enough foothold in solid state.

[ik9000]

If it wasnt for the emergence of ssd, who knows what state we'd be in.

presumably liquid or gas, given the absence of solid state?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Toshiba is also affected:
https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/1...tic-recording/

[lumi]

I suppose it is about WD EFAX drives. I use mainly WD RED 4TB drives, but EFRX versions that should be CMR based. It is still possible to buy them, but were already replaced by WD40EFAX versions, that to my knowledge are already SMR based.

[ik9000]

I suppose it is about WD EFAX drives. I use mainly WD RED 4TB drives, but EFRX versions that should be CMR based. It is still possible to buy them, but were already replaced by WD40EFAX versions, that to my knowledge are already SMR based.

WD40efax - lubricated to slip quietly under the radar? I guess somebody didn't spray enough on and they got caught.

[Tabbykatze]

Reading up on the statistics and what happens with SMR drives in arrays, these honestly should not be marketed as NAS drives. The fact that it operates so wildly differently from its CMR brethren and has an entirely different operating state (as they say in the article, more like an SSD), sticking either of these drives in an array is asking for trouble.

[DanceswithUnix]

NAS was the last big holdout for rotating rust, it's like they want to force us onto SSD!

[Teece]

Bought a 3GB WD Red last month, luckily it was an EFRX, matching the other three in my NAS... Next time I'm in the market, I'll be bearing this in mind.

[edmundhonda]

I suppose it is about WD EFAX drives. I use mainly WD RED 4TB drives, but EFRX versions that should be CMR based. It is still possible to buy them, but were already replaced by WD40EFAX versions, that to my knowledge are already SMR based.

Whole ordeal is further confused by the fact that EFAX is just the refreshed model designation, so the WD80EFAX etc are all still CMR. Allegedly.

[Spreadie]

This came up on Reddit last year - it's hardly recent news.

[johnniedoo]

If it wasnt for the emergence of ssd, who knows what state we'd be in.

presumably liquid or gas, given the absence of solid state?

very good
i gave up on seagate over 5yr ago. 2 bricked in less than 18months. I still run some WD hard drives over 12yr later.i am sad to see that WD has become less dependable that they had been. only after samsung spin points disappeared that i tried out WD-caviar black back then and have had very good luck with them. i only buy ssds and have done for about 4 or 5yrs. all my ssd purchases are still working and i have not lost any of my dozen or 15 WD mechanical drives, both my 2 seagates first 2 and last 2 i ever bought. i am trying to decide whether to back up the stored data on my mechanical drives on same medium or not. it is time.
i had been browsing WD to check out options to back up the 12 or so TB of stuff and bad news to me to see this. thanks for posting

[Bambooz]

My bunch of WD80EMAZ shucked from 3.5" external mybook/elements USB drives are all still CMR thank feck.
And in case anyone wonders what the point of ripping out drives from external cases is: these 8TB Mybooks/Elements go on sale for ~135-139eur quite regularly. And if you were to buy the (admittedly white label in the USB cases) WD Reds inside them bare, it would set you back 200-230eur for essentially the same HDD. Nobrainer really, especially since the warranty/replacement procedure for the bare drives tends to be useless anyway

SMR needs to GTFO. It's pointless for all use cases except cold (= long term) storage. Just another band-aid instead of developing something new. Finding these junk drives mixed in with CMR drives and not mentioning it / downright denying it should be punished in some way