Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB Red NAS hard drives use shingled magnetic recording

[Arthur]

Most of the WD Red drive models ending in 'EFAX' appear to be SMR.

 

Source: Blocks and Files (via Reddit)

 

Some users are experiencing problems adding the latest WD Red NAS drives to RAID arrays and suspect it is because they are actually shingled magnetic recording drives submarined into the channel.

 

SMR drives

Shingled media recording (SMR) disk drives take advantage of disk write tracks being wider than read tracks to partially overlap write tracks and so enable more tracks to be written to a disk platter. This means more data can be stored on a shingled disk compared to an ordinary drive.

 

However, SMR drives are not intended for random write IO use cases because the write performance is much slower than with a non-SMR drive. Therefore they are not recommended for NAS use cases featuring significant random write workloads.

 

[...]

 

WD comment

We brought all these points to Western Digital’s attention and a spokesperson told us:

 

"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 Red 2TB-6TB drives are device-managed SMR (DMSMR). WD Red 8TB-14TB drives are CMR-based.

 

The information you shared from [Geizhals] appears to be inaccurate.

 

You are correct that we do not specify recording technology in our WD Red HDD documentation.

 

We strive to make the experience for our NAS customers seamless, and recording technology typically does not impact small business/home NAS-based use cases. In device-managed SMR HDDs, the drive does its internal data management during idle times. In a typical small business/home NAS environment, workloads tend to be bursty in nature, leaving sufficient idle time for garbage collection and other maintenance operations.

 

In our testing of WD Red drives, we have not found RAID rebuild issues due to SMR technology.

 

We would be happy to work with customers on experiences they may have, but would need further, detailed information for each individual situation."

Edited April 15, 2020 by Arthur

[Arthur]

It's almost as if they don't want you to buy HDDs by making them even slower than they are normally.

 

Sneaky Marketing Redux: Toshiba, Seagate Shipping Slower SMR Drives Without Disclosure, Too

 

News emerged earlier this week that Western Digital was sneaking out hard drives using inferior SMR technology -- which results in devastatingly slow performance in some types of applications -- without disclosing that fact to customers in marketing materials or specification sheets. After a bit of continued prodding, storage industry sage Chris Mellor secured statements from both Seagate and Toshiba that confirmed that those companies, too, engage in the misleading tactic of selling drives using the slow SMR technology without informing their customers. The latter two even use the tech in hard drives destined for desktop PCs.

 

Given that SMR drives suffer from abysmal random write performance, which is a key type of write pattern that impacts performance in desktop operating systems, the drives will result in noticeably slower performance for PC users.

 

It's important to understand that there are different methods of recording data to a hard drive, and of the productized methods, shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is by far the slowest. That results in a perceivable difference in performance and even compatibility issues with some types of applications (like RAID). As such, these drives are mainly intended for write-once-read-many (WORM) applications, like archival and cold data storage, and certainly not as boot drives for mainstream PC users.

 

[...]

 

Unfortunately, the industry has now shifted to selling these drives in product families that have traditionally consisted of 'normal' models that use the faster conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technique, but without disclosing that fact to consumers.

 

For WD, that consisted of working the SMR models into its WD Red line of drives, but only the lower-capacity 2TB to 6TB models. Slower SMR drives do make some measure of sense in this type of application, provided the NAS is used for bulk data storage. Still, compatibility issues have cropped up in RAID and ZFS applications that users have attributed to the unique performance characteristics of the drives.

 

Toshiba tells Block and Files that it is also selling SMR drives without disclosure, but does so within its P300 series of desktop drives. Seagate also disclosed that it uses the tech in four models, including its Desktop HDD 5TB, without disclosure. However, Seagate, like others, does correctly label several of their archival hard drives as using SMR tech, making the lack of disclosure on mainstream models appear to be a bit of purposeful deception.

[mavhc]

I just put a ST8000DM004 8TB drive into my 12 disk raidz2, on zfs 0.8, it took 8 days (so terribly slow 9MB/sec), but no errors resilvering

[Arthur]

https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives

 

The past week has been eventful, to say the least. As a team, it was important that we listened carefully and understood your feedback about our WD Red NAS drives, specifically how we communicated which recording technologies are used. Your concerns were heard loud and clear. Here is that list of our client internal HDDs available through the channel:

 

 

 

^ Anyone remember when Black drives were the fastest consumer HDDs (ignoring the WD Velociraptor)?

 

I just put a ST8000DM004 8TB drive into my 12 disk raidz2, on zfs 0.8, it took 8 days (so terribly slow 9MB/sec)

Wow! That's 7 days more than it took to add a 14TB HDD to my Synology NAS.

 

Won't your Seagate SMR HDD slow down the entire VDEV it's in?

Edited April 25, 2020 by Arthur

[mavhc]

Won't your Seagate SMR HDD slow down the entire VDEV it's in?

 

No, because all the others are also SMR, it's basically write once anyway, so not much of an issue. Dunno why it was so slow, but at least it didn't error, unlike when I zfs s/r'd it originally

[XiJ]

https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/

 

This one seems to have a bit more details