WD sneaking SMR into Red disks

[markymark832]

Shingled hard drives have non-shingled zones for caching writes – Blocks and Files

The revelation that some WD Red NAS drives are shipped with DM-SMR (Drive-Managed Shingled Magnetic Recording) prompted us to ask more detailed questions to the Blocks & Files reader who alerted us to the issue. Alan Brown, a British university network manager, has a high degree of SMR smarts...

blocksandfiles.com

Probably loads of people will understand this better than me, it came up on my news feed, does the article mean WD reds aren't engineered for zfs?

 

[hervon]

Search the forums. The SMR plague has been addressed many times. WD had been secretive about which drives are SMR.

 

[Ericloewe]

It looks like WD is trying to get into the naughty list by sneaking SMR disks under the WD Red brand:

Western Digital Fesses Up: Some Red HDDs Use Slow SMR Tech Without Disclosure

The company failed to disclose the use of SMR in advertising or spec sheets.

www.tomshardware.com

Apparently, they're doing it for the lower capacity units (up to 6 TB), EFAX models are likely to be SMR, EFRX models are likely to be traditional.

 

[garm]

Shingled hard drives have non-shingled zones for caching writes – Blocks and Files

The revelation that some WD Red NAS drives are shipped with DM-SMR (Drive-Managed Shingled Magnetic Recording) prompted us to ask more detailed questions to the Blocks & Files reader who alerted us to the issue. Alan Brown, a British university network manager, has a high degree of SMR smarts...

blocksandfiles.com

 

[cobrakiller58]

this quote just made me shake my head from a blocksandfiles article about this

“Well the higher team contacted me back and informed me that the information I requested about whether or not the WD60EFAX was a SMR or PMR would not be provided to me. They said that information is not disclosed to consumers. LOL. WOW.“

Seagate is there something you also need to tell us....? I wonder if anyone from iXsystems have any trouble because of this, don't they prefer WD drivers?

 

[garm]

Well I’m never buying WD again after this.. my ironwolfs are performing great and I will be replacing my reds with wolfs when I’m out of space in a few months...

 

[cobrakiller58]

people have been having trouble with Seagate drives dropping out of arrays as well some ironwolfs and i think some sata exos check out those thread before buying your next batch of drives.

 

[Ericloewe]

The detail about the firmware not being able to deal with empty sectors is very relevant to ZFS.

You might be asking "but scrub/resilver doesn't read from empty sectors!". Well, they can, if they're issuing a large read that happens to have a small bit of something else (data or empty space) in the middle. Much better to just tell the disk to read one large stream between LBA A and LBA D, instead of telling it to read from A to B and separately from C to D, for small distances between B and C. In fact, this sort of trick should make ZFS somewhat bearable on SMR disks, in the right setting.

The fact that the disks cannot deal with a trivial optimization that improves their performance in what could have been a pathological scenario just screams "brain-dead" to me.

Between brain-dead firmware and deceptive practices, this does WD's image no good at all.

Well I’m never buying WD again after this.. my ironwolfs are performing great and I will be replacing my reds with wolfs when I’m out of space in a few months...

I haven't been following things very closely - I know that Seagate replaced some lower-end models with SMR units, but did they disclose that when they did?

 

[cobrakiller58]

I know that Seagate replaced some lower-end models with SMR units, but did they disclose that when they did?

Seagate has been iffy on disclosure of such things for years. I won't be shunning WD or Seagate since generally speaking they both make good drives.

 

[garm]

They started shipping a SME branded drive, as far as I know they don’t hide it in their other models

 

[John Doe]

I am not too sure if that is correct. There are some missleading information flying arround.

This is a statement from WD:

All our WD Red drives are designed meet or exceed the performance requirements and specifications for common small business/home NAS workloads. We work closely with major NAS providers to ensure WD Red HDDs (and SSDs) at all capacities have broad compatibility with host systems. Currently, Western Digital's WD Red 2TB-6TB drives are device-managed SMR (DMSMR). WD Red 8TB-14TB are CMR-based

that looks to me reasonable, they use the smaller ones to save some money

 

[Belphegor]

This has been reported in online shop aggregators for quite some time, see for instance heise.de.

This is a bummer since the WD Reds were ideal for people who didn't want 7200 RPM drives. Due to this silent move by WD, I went with IronWolf drives for my latest drive replacement.

Will iXSystems still recommend WD Red drives in the future?

 

[cobrakiller58]

If it is true that the larger Red's haven't changed why wouldn't they? the smaller Reds I hear about the most from people shucking WD external drives.

 

[garm]

There is a core design philosophy here that bothers me, throw data to the platter asap and ask questions later. This is contrary to ZFS design philosophy and I can’t really see how this would be even close to long term reliable unless ZFS gets built in explicit support for SMR some how

 

[garm]

For

requirements and specifications for common small business/home NAS workloads

this is probably just fine, but ZFS is not equal to “home NAS workload”. And the fact that their higher capacity drives do not deploy the same configuration seams to indicate that enterprise workload would never allow this. They are screwing over enthusiasts and small businesses, and not considering ZFS at all, so I won’t consider them in return.

 

[elorimer]

Thanks for this. I just received today a WDRed 4TB to replace a failed drive and see it is the 'newer model' FAX, so that's been returned and a FRX ($6 more) ordered instead. Just 17 now left at Amazon.

 

[danb35]

WD had been secretive about which drives are SMR.

...as Seagate continues to be.

 

[Yorick]

Seagate 'submarines' SMR into 3 Barracuda drives and a Desktop HDD – Blocks and Files

Some Seagate Barracuda Compute and Desktop disk drives use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology which can exhibit slow data write speeds. But Seagate documentation does not spell this out. Yesterday we reported Western Digital has submarined SMR drives into certain WD Red NAS drives. The...

blocksandfiles.com

A resource that lists known SMR drives would be helpful

 

[Ericloewe]

Thanks for this. I just received today a WDRed 4TB to replace a failed drive and see it is the 'newer model' FAX, so that's been returned and a FRX ($6 more) ordered instead. Just 17 now left at Amazon.

I'd actually bought four Reds a couple of weeks ago. I got lucky and got EFRX units, though.

 

[HoneyBadger]

They started shipping a SME branded drive, as far as I know they don’t hide it in their other models

Seagate hid their use of SMR quite a bit in the early days, I believe it was the ST8000DM004 which actually had the mention of SMR removed from its datasheet partway through its lifespan.