WD sneaking SMR into Red disks

[Harrisonm65]

I actually do doubt it. WD is competing with Seagate and Toshiba. When you look at WD Red, Ironwolf and N300, their Newegg sale price is right around 25 USD / TB for each, with maybe a hair more in the 8-12TB range. It’s only the 14TB drive that commands a premium.

Red Plus will still be competing with Ironwolf and N300, which means there isn’t room to increase the price noticeably without driving customers to the competition.

There is room to undercut Ironwolf and N300 with “Red” (SMR) by maybe 5 per TB or so, and try and capture some extra market share that way.

All idle speculation of course: We will know in August.

Id love it if this was the case. What you say makes a lot of sense and Id actually be pretty happy if they do as you've hinted at. Just always seems to be the person at the end of the line i.e. us consumers, that get the rough end of the stick though usually. I wouldnt be at all surprised if we got stung after they tried to pull the wool over our eyes.

 

[Yorick]

If WD doesn’t price this the way you like, there’ll be a Seagate or Toshiba NAS drive waiting at the “old Red” price. Granted those are louder and produce more heat, because they spin faster.

 

[Yorick]

No doubt WD will shaft us on pricing with their new range.

Well, the Red+ isn't out yet, but the store offers CMR and SMR drives side-by-side. 6TB CMR: USD 160, 6TB SMR: USD 150.

Same USD 10 difference at 4TB; at 3TB it's a USD 5 difference, and 2TB is a USD 8 difference.

I didn't take a screen shot. Did they drop the SMR by 10, or raise the CMR by 10?

 

[sretalla]

Well, the Red+ isn't out yet

I see them in stores here (Switzerland). They are strangely cheaper than the RED... for 10TB at least, I wonder if that means helium in the RED and no helium in RED+

On closer inspection, the 10TB in the RED range is actually a RED PRO, so 7200 RPM, hence the price difference of 60.

I also see a new 6TB purple has surfaced, confirmed to be CMR... there's no RED+ 6TB, only the RED 6TB SMR.

 

[Yorick]

10TB exists in two variants; 100 is helium and 101 is air. I think the intent by WD is to switch over to mostly air for that capacity and model.

 

[Yorick]

Side note: There's a feature on OpenZFS 2.0 that is squarely aimed at resilver on SMR disks, with mirror vdevs. It's called device_rebuild, available from TrueNAS 12.0 BETA2, and described as:

This feature enables the ability for the zpool attach and zpool
replace subcommands to perform sequential reconstruction (instead
of healing reconstruction) when resilvering.

Sequential reconstruction resilvers a device in LBA order without
immediately verifying the checksums. Once complete a scrub is
started which then verifies the checksums. This approach allows
full redundancy to be restored to the pool in the minimum amount of
time. This two phase approach will take longer than a healing
resilver when the time to verify the checksums is included.
However, unless there is additional pool damage no checksum errors
should be reported by the scrub. This feature is incompatible with
raidz configurations.

 

[Ericloewe]

Wait, what happens if you add a RAIDZ vdev to a pool that has that feature flag enabled?

 

[Yorick]

Wait, what happens if you add a RAIDZ vdev to a pool that has that feature flag enabled?

I’m assuming nothing at all. You just don’t get to do “truly sequential resilver”, feature flag or no.

The flag is active during an in-LBA-order resilver, and enabled otherwise.

 

[Ericloewe]

I was thinking the semantics were kinda weird, but they're no more so than for device removal. In both cases you have enabled flags that can never become active.