WD Sets the Record Straight: Lists All Drives That Use Slower SMR Tech (tomshardware.com) 138
News emerged last week that WD, Seagate and Toshiba are all shipping hard drives using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), a slower form of HDD technology that can result in reduced performance in some types of workloads, but without disclosing that critical bit of information in marketing materials or specification sheets. The backlash has been swift, and now WD is striking a conciliatory tone with its customers in an update to its blog. The company also divulged that it is also shipping SMR technology in some of its WD Blue and WD Black hard drives for desktop PCs and laptops. Tom's Hardware reports: The new disclosure comes on the heels of WD's blog post yesterday that outlined its stance on using SMR drives. The company contends that SMR technology is adequate for the applications the drives are designed for, but that is certainly an open matter of debate with many users claiming the drives cause problems in RAID arrays. The issues purportedly stem from the slow random write speeds, which do cause a measurable reduction in performance, and background activities that are purportedly responsible for the drives dropping from RAID arrays. In either case, The WD blog advised users they should step up to more expensive models designed for heavier workloads if they have more demanding needs.
Today the company updated its blog with a more conciliatory tone, and also disclosed all of its drive models that are shipping with SMR tech. In addition to the WD Red NAS drives that the company previously admitted used SMR tech, WD is also shipping the tech into its 2.5"and 3.5" WD Blue and 2.5" WD Black lineups. Both models are designed for desktop PCs and laptops, with the former coming as a value drive while the latter is designed for high-performance users. WD acknowledged the recent brouhaha surrounding the fact it was shipping drives without disclosing they use the slower recording technology, stating: "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..." Importantly, the blog states, "...Thank you for letting us know how we can do better. We will update our marketing materials, as well as provide more information about SMR technology, including benchmarks and ideal use cases." WD also said that they will share further data in the future, including benchmarks that might prove otherwise.
Today the company updated its blog with a more conciliatory tone, and also disclosed all of its drive models that are shipping with SMR tech. In addition to the WD Red NAS drives that the company previously admitted used SMR tech, WD is also shipping the tech into its 2.5"and 3.5" WD Blue and 2.5" WD Black lineups. Both models are designed for desktop PCs and laptops, with the former coming as a value drive while the latter is designed for high-performance users. WD acknowledged the recent brouhaha surrounding the fact it was shipping drives without disclosing they use the slower recording technology, stating: "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..." Importantly, the blog states, "...Thank you for letting us know how we can do better. We will update our marketing materials, as well as provide more information about SMR technology, including benchmarks and ideal use cases." WD also said that they will share further data in the future, including benchmarks that might prove otherwise.
Also Red... (Score:2)
I got lucky it looks like, Red models up to 6TB are SMR, I ordered a WD Red at the end of last year that was an 8TB and that is still CMR.
It looks like no model over 6TB shipped with SMR.
Re:Also Red... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's strange that the lower capacity drives are the ones with SMR. I would think that SMR would be more useful in higher capacity drives, I don't think it's difficult to make a 6TB CMR drive, especially since older RED models of those capacities were CMR.
Re:Also Red... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
>"they want to cut the platter/ head count, for the sake of profit margins."
Or for the sake of lowering prices as to undercut their competition. If all they wanted was more profit, they could just raise the price to $600 per drive and see how that works out...
Re:Also Red... (Score:5, Insightful)
" If all they wanted was more profit, they could just raise the price to $600 per drive and see how that works out..."
No they couldn't. One can't sell a product higher than the market is able to find buyers. Figuring out how to sell higher capacity with the same hardware costs for less money is a very profitable method. Not being specific about the exact specification change is somewhat questionable.
Non disclosure isn't necessarily misrepresentation of a products merchantability, when it doesn't function as represented (IE: raid functionality) it does become a problem.
I've not head of any buyer that had an issue with an exchange or refund of said products, and the "my bad" statement from the company was necessary.
There's plenty of products that for one reason or another, after time don't function per disclosed functionality due to engineering or design flaws. Some, even following proven issues in their engineering fail to acknowledge the design flaw and charge customers that don't aggressively petition for a correction to pay. Specifically, I'm pointing at you DJI (https://forum.dji.com/thread-83975-1-1.html), just an example.
Never had a problem with WDs products, nor a lack of an easy warranty solution. So the knuckle wrap was necessary, they took responsibility and lost no reputation.
Kudos for that.
Re: (Score:2)
>"No they couldn't. One can't sell a product higher than the market is able to find buyers."
That was kinda my point; I was being ridiculous on purpose. There are many on Slashdot who seem think that companies can just set prices to whatever they want and rake in the profit. A properly-running free market (no crony capitalism government interference, no monopolies, etc) doesn't work that way. Sure, they can set the price to whatever they want, and if it is too high, nobody will buy it, the company wil
Re:Also Red... (Score:5, Informative)
No speculation. The WD40EFRX started as a 4/8 drive, then became a 3/6 drive and the SMR models are a 2/4 drive.
Re: (Score:2)
It's strange that the lower capacity drives are the ones with SMR.
It has nothing to do with total capacity and every to do with platter capacity and cost. When the WD40EFRX-xxWT0Nx was released it was a 4 platter 8 head drive. The first cost reduction came with the WD40EFRX-xxN32Nx which are 3 platter 6 head drives. The SMR drives are WD40EFAX-xxJH4Nx which have 2 platters and 4 heads, further reducing the cost of storage.
This is how they get storage costs down, there's more digits in the model number than what is on the front of the box.
Re: (Score:2)
The funny thing is that in my local store, the 4TB purple WD40PURZ is a few Euros cheaper than WD40EFAX. And the Purple is CMR.
I wonder what their actual differences are, maybe the purple drives would work in a NAS just as well. Continuous video recording is not "mostly idle".
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps (just one possibility) the Purples were not selling as well as expected so there is excess inventory that needs to be sold off.
Re: (Score:2)
That could be, though the prices on WD e-shop are similar too (though this time Purple is more expensive $123.99 vs $119.99 for Red). Both drives have TLER, but the Red is SMR.
So, the margin on the Red is probably higher - WD though that nobody would notice a SMR drive in a home NAS, while a SMR drive for recording multiple cameras would be unusable.
Then again, maybe the Purple drive has data retention of a few months or some other problem that makes it unusable for general storage. It has a smaller cache,
Re: (Score:3)
The funny thing is that in my local store, the 4TB purple WD40PURZ is a few Euros cheaper than WD40EFAX. And the Purple is CMR.
I wonder what their actual differences are, maybe the purple drives would work in a NAS just as well. Continuous video recording is not "mostly idle".
So a few things:
Purple drives are targeted at continuous recording applications. Those can't be SMR as the drive re-write algorithm required for SMR results in the drive stalling. You see that when doing large transfers on SMR drives, perfectly normal speeds for for the first X GB and then suddenly the drive appears to stall for many seconds at a time.
On the technical level we can look at them side by side to get the answer:
Sustained transfer: PURZ: 150MB/s, EFAX: 180MB/s
Cache: PURZ: 64MB, EFAX: 256MB
Cycle
Re: (Score:3)
https://www.westerndigital.com... [westerndigital.com]
It says here that Purple drives support TLER as well. And yeah, I like TLER on all drives. I'd rather know there is a problem (and use something like ddrescue to repeatedly try to read the sector) instead of having random freezes until the drive completely fails.
As for the other differences you listed, they do not seem that great.
Sequential transfer is a bit faster on the Red, but random writes would suck, so Purple would be better here on average IMO. Smaller drive cache ca
Re: (Score:2)
It's strange that the lower capacity drives are the ones with SMR. I would think that SMR would be more useful in higher capacity drives, I don't think it's difficult to make a 6TB CMR drive, especially since older RED models of those capacities were CMR.
Indeed. This is actually a pretty strong hint that there is something else wrong with SMR at this time.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see what the big deal is.
If I'm buying spinning disks these days I'm buying for capacity, not speed. SMR mostly slows down small transactions, not the sustained writes of archival. I'll certainly trade a percentage of that for higher capacity at the same price point.
The only problem for me would be if SMR compromised reliability, but it doesn't.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the issue isn't whether SMR is a viable technology or not, and whether drive manufacturers should offer it as a cost effective option.
It's that they were using it without telling people.
You'll happily buy the SMR disks. Others have a usage pattern that CMR will better support. People that don't have a clue and don't give a shit will buy whatever comes inside their prebuilt computer.
In 1yr SMR will be gone (Score:2)
Re:In 1yr SMR will be gone (Score:5, Insightful)
I am pretty sure that people will still buy the SMR drives. The technology is not useless and in some cases it's OK. If you only use the drive for storing movies (not many writes and most writes are sequential) you can save some money buy buying a SMR drive.
As long as WD and others do not lie about the technology, people can make informed decisions and buy the products that suit them.
Re: In 1yr SMR will be gone (Score:2)
SMR has its place, but we *need* to know about it.
Luckily this fiasco is unlikely to have affected the most critically affected users such as hardware RAID etc. since it only applies to small drives.
Re: (Score:2)
Well some people do build arrays out of small drives if they do not need a lot of space, but would like the reliability of RAID.
Hopefully all manufacturers will explicitly specify whether a drive is CMR or SMR in the datasheet.
Re: (Score:3)
> Well some people do build arrays out of small drives if they do not need a lot of space, but would like the reliability of RAID.
Yeah, if I were building a small array for a friend with modest needs, it would probably be something like 5 or 6 4TB drives in a RAID-Z2 configuration with a hot spare. "12 TB of very-redundant storage for under $500" isn't a bad deal.
Unless the drives stop responding to writes for 120 seconds, which is rumored to happen sometimes. If they weren't SO damn cheap they could h
Re:In 1yr SMR will be gone (Score:5, Informative)
Scroll down to Conclusions [arstechnica.com]
They are trying to pass cheaper drives for the same prices.
Re:In 1yr SMR will be gone (Score:4)
Now they will have to reduce the price of the SMR drives, because people will choose a CMR drive if the price is the same so only people that would buy a SMR drive for CMR price would be those who do not read the news or drive datasheets.
So, either the CMR price has to go up (I doubt it, since if they could raise it, they would have done so already) or the SMR price has to go down.
This is why WD did not want anyone to find out that they are selling SMR drives for CMR price.
Re: (Score:2)
Now they will have to reduce the price of the SMR drives,
They already did. Back when they introduced the SMR variant the drive RRP dropped by 20EUR.
Re: (Score:2)
They are trying to pass cheaper drives for the same prices.
Great story. Would be more believable if the cost of storage didn't come down continuously, and that this reduction in cost has always been through advancement of platter density resulting in reduced platters, less heads, and newer top end capacities.
The SMR drives aren't the same cost as their CMR counterparts, they are cheaper, and also don't have as many platters or heads, and as an example on the 4TB range only the 2 platter 4 head drives were the ones that have SMR. Having bought some of these models o
Re: (Score:2)
When other reports looked into this earlier in the week -- there was no "savings on SMR." The SMR drives were within a couple dollars of comparable capacity CMR drives... and in some cases the SMR drives were listed at a higher price than comparable CMR drives.
The savings are going to the manufacturers almost entirely.
Re: (Score:2)
Theres a big problem out there that WD has just caused - a lot of Synology Diskstations were packaged with WD Red drives already installed, and people are reporting problems with SMR drives in these units.
I have a DS415 with 4 3TB Reds - Im getting to the point where i need to upgrade diskspace, which should be a relatively simple task of upgrading one drive at a time and rebuilding. To do that, you cant swap types of drive tho - a 6TB Red would be the recommended approach but not a Seagate etc.
So what do
Re: (Score:2)
To do that, you cant swap types of drive tho - a 6TB Red would be the recommended approach but not a Seagate etc.
Why? To quote a meme "drive is drive".
Well maybe Synology does not like different manufacturer drives in one array, but I had zfs pools with mixed drives (from the start or replacing a broken Seagate drive with a WD one) etc with no problems. Wouldn't it actually be better to have drives from different manufacturers and batches so that they don't fail at the same time?
Re: (Score:2)
No.
In an array that has any tuning at all, mismatched access and dirty cache can ruin fetch rates, and worse, read-after-write times. Use the same drives; it normalizes performance, even if the performance is going to be slow. If you want to have a slow array, that's fine, just know not to complain when things drag on. Mismatching drives is a recipe for odd problems.
Re: (Score:2)
That's interesting, I never noticed those problems, even having a 7200RPM and 5400RPM drives in the same vdev - sometimes by mistake (thought that a couple of Barracudas I had were 7k2, bought some ultrastars put them all in the same raidz2 and then found out that the Barracudas are not only 5k4, but SMR as well) sometimes because I had to replace a failed drive and could not get the correct one or did not want to buy from the same manufacturer again, because this was the 5th failed drive in a few months.
Re: In 1yr SMR will be gone (Score:2)
Ideally you want drives from different manufacturers in your RAID array and be done with any if they exist performance issues. If you don't understand why may I suggest stop giving out advice you don't understand. I would also point out that since drives started doing sector mapping behind the scenes your notions that might impact performance are not going to hold true for drives that are the same model anyway, which means it is meaningless guff being spouted by the inexperienced. Oh and I would personally
Re: (Score:2)
Ideally you want drives from different manufacturers in your RAID array and be done with any if they exist performance issues. If you don't understand why may I suggest stop giving out advice you don't understand.
If I buy storage from Hitachi, they do not give me mixed drive manufacturers.
If I buy storage from Dell EMC, they do not give me mixed drive manufactures.
If I buy storage from HPE, they do not give me mixed drive manufactures.
I could keep going but I've made my point. You're the one talking utter fucking nonsense.
Re: (Score:2)
Previous poster was talking about simple, at home, software RAID arrays where you can throw just about any old crap together and make it work. You're talking real, hardware RAID systems, which are a lot more picky (for good reason) and is comparing apples to oranges.
Re: (Score:2)
Cant trust a WD drive now
Actually it sounds like you can't trust Synology. A WD Red drive still obeys TLER an SCT which should prevent them from degrading an array during an unstable workload, and it sounds like Synology is ignoring that.
There's nothing inherent in SMR that cause problems in RAID systems which are configured to properly communicate with the drives in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And most of those people will probably be OK with an SMR drive.
Re: (Score:2)
They don't "have" to be public. They're saying they are. A few years from now they could go back to their old ways, assuming there's any reason for them to do so at the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Sad, but probably true. At least they came clean for now.
Re: (Score:2)
Within a year I predict WD will cease selling drives with the technology.
Got an alternative? I mean people have been predicting the death of SMR since the day it first hit the market. First it was Helium. LOOK LOOK WD use helium, Seagate's technology is dead on arrival! Yeah, nah. Helium is expensive and doesn't work well. HAMR and MAMR haven't left the lab yet.
Re: (Score:2)
Helium is actually a really good gas to fill the drive casings with, everything else being equal. Sadly, the air inside the drive tends to be lower on the list of items that cause drives to overheat and wear. More common issues are case design, case air flow, DUST! and stickers/labels stuck on heat sinks (often by the manufacturer... WTF?!).
Re: (Score:2)
Doubt it - SMR allows for higher data densities, which means larger drives with less platters. Thus, an SMR drive will be cheaper. And when consumers are preferred, they're going to see a 6TB SMR drive for the same price as a 4TB CMR drive. You might buy the 4TB, but the consumer doing a hard disk upgrade for their computer might see the 6TB as a better
Re: (Score:3)
Think about it. If you can use 10-20% of the drive as a non-SMR "cache" and use the rest as SMR, only certain high-duty-cycle random-write use cases will be impacted.
Like rebuilding a zfs pool or a hardware RAID array.
Exactly Re:Maybe not Re:In 1yr SMR will be gone (Score:2)
People who use hardware RAID or ZFS or who would otherwise be impacted by an SMR drive with very generous non-SMR cache know who they are and will be choosey about the drives they buy.
Your average user who hasn't switched to pure-solid-state will benefit from the overall lower cost-per-TB.
Let's look at a typical home or office desktop computer user. 90% of them are either using NTFS on Windows 10 or they have a Mac running macOS. They have only one hard drive. Their drive's duty cycle is well under 25% a
Re: (Score:3)
I'm also leaving NAS boxes, servers, camera systems, and other use "not a typical PC workstation" use cases out of this "90%" calculation
Well, the problem was that WD advertised the RED drives as designed for use in a small NAS and RAID (up to 8 drives IIRC), but some of those drives were SMR.
SMR with any size cache would suck during a rebuild, especially for zfs (maybe hardware RAID can rebuild the array sequentially and maybe the drive can recognize that and just write the data directly but good luck with zfs).
I guess one could build an array using SMR drives and then when one failed, replace it with a CMR drive. That would work.
Regular de
Re: (Score:2)
Further, I wonder if the reduction in plat
Re: (Score:2)
But, it appears the whole point of this was to reduce cost of production, not lower the price to the consumer, not inform the consumer of this, and laugh all the way to the bank. Making it a hybrid drive or upping the cache significantly would defeat WD and the other manufacturers whole purpose of this which was to screw the unsuspecting consumer.
Re: (Score:2)
I wouldn't want to play a first-person shooter or any open-world style game on ANY PC with a SMR drive! That's be like going back to dialup for the internet!
Re: (Score:3)
> I'm also leaving NAS boxes, servers, camera systems, and other use "not a typical PC workstation" use cases out of this "90%" calculation. People who design those systems will need to know which kinds of storage is appropriate for their particular use.
This controversy erupted, partially, because people were buying WD NAS drives for their Drobos and getting extremely high "failure" rates, and taking to Amazon reviews to complain.
It's a consumer NAS drive in a consumer NAS that's advertised as a box you
Re: (Score:2)
Compared to how many platter drives I've had fail on me the last 10 years, SSD drives have been a godsend. Now, I will note that not all manufacturers are equivalent. TSMC spindle drives are vastly more reliable than their competitors and the price shows it. The rest are utter garbage. For SSDs, for top reliability, you want Intel but, be prepared to pay for it (one of the few times Intel earns their price premium). Samsung takes both speed mark with good reliability, again, prepare for a price hit (ag
This is like the airlines widening the seats (Score:5, Insightful)
or giving a little more leg room because they "care about their customers' comfort". If they cared so much, why did they make the seats so narrow and leg room so short in the first place?
Now WD says "we heard you" but did they ever ask about it before they switched the HDD technology? Someone had to dig into it to figure out what they did and they got caught so now they suddenly care about what their customers think.
Re: (Score:2)
At least they came clean. If it encourages Seagate and Toshiba to do the same then its better for buyers everywhere.
Re: This is like the airlines widening the seats (Score:2)
It is also a neat trick. ... keep doing the evil thing. Aka "doing an NSA". Don't forget to double down on the evil once you got no reputation left to lose.
Do two evil things, then undo one of them, and people who say you are evil, will be silenced.
Or actually, do an evil thing... come clean
Re: (Score:2)
It is also a neat trick.
Do two evil things, then undo one of them, and people who say you are evil, will be silenced.
Not all of them. In my book, they are now a "scummy tech company lying about their products" and have a clear "do not trust for the foreseeable future" label. I was considering looking at their SSDs, but that business is now lost to them.
Re: (Score:2)
or giving a little more leg room because they "care about their customers' comfort". If they cared so much, why did they make the seats so narrow and leg room so short in the first place?
Airlines don't offer everyone comfort seats. Only select customers who pay more. They care a lot about customers, so much so they want them all, which is why they lowered the seat width and pitch in the first place. I find it hilarious that people actively complain about the airlines given how much they have done to reduce the cost of air travel.
Do you fly first class? Why not? It's the same price as an economy ticket 25 years ago. Your luxury is still there if you weren't such a whining tightarse.
Re: This is like the airlines widening the seats (Score:2)
You are a true pro-evil spin doctor. Congratulations.
Oh what nice coprorations! Doing so much good PROFIT. Aka the part of the income that is not earned, but robbed.
Re: (Score:2)
You are a true pro-evil spin doctor. Congratulations.
Nope. Just a tightarse happy to be able to fly to the other side of the continent for less than the cost of dinner and a beer at a cheap restaurant.
But I'm sure you have never looked into the cost of flying since your posts are always an attempt to make you look as ignorant as possible (I'm honestly thinking you're putting on an act at this point).
Re: (Score:2)
You must work for an airline...
That comfortable seat for people who pay more is a relatively recent phenomenon when the airlines adopted a cellphone plan pricing model in which the ticket price is kept low but fees are charged for anything and everything possible making it nearly impossible to compare or locate lower prices or to know exactly what any given flight is going to cost until you get to the airport.
If this were the 16th century you'd be telling me how slave ships made it possible for so many unem
Re: (Score:2)
You must work for an airline...
Good god no. I work for far worse companies.
That comfortable seat for people who pay more is a relatively recent phenomenon when the airlines adopted a cellphone plan pricing model in which the ticket price is kept low but fees are charged for anything and everything possible making it nearly impossible to compare or locate lower prices or to know exactly what any given flight is going to cost until you get to the airport.
False. These options have existed for the best part of 10-15 years. (I don't work at an airline, but the job I do work in has netted me platinum status at one airline and gold status at two others). Though I still fly tightarse low cost garbage airlines every couple of months for vacation, so no I'm not sitting in a comfy business class seat.
The cost of the options are directly comparable since airlines almost universally offer the same cost. They also for a simil
In related news ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: In related news ... (Score:2)
This is done because "Funny" doesn't give karma, but they want to give you karma.
Re: (Score:2)
This is done because "Funny" doesn't give karma, but they want to give you karma.
I've been on /. since about 1999 and actually didn't know that, thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry dude, they told you the secret. Now, we have to kill you.
Re: (Score:2)
WD will ship very large "Scriptorium" drives that use MR (Monk Recording) technology to archive your data on parchment.
You mean like in The Bibble [youtube.com]?
I dunno, those pesky drunk time travellers will probably defeat all data integrity measures... :(
Whew... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You mean those killing machines that launched 5.25" steel discs at 5,400 RPM outside the case!
Blue and Black? (Score:2)
It's unacceptable for WD Blue drives, so why is it even on WD Black drives?
Is SMR ever advantageous? (Score:2)
From the consumer standpoint, I mean. Aside from the theoretical cost advantage, which the consumer probably doesn't actually see... is there anything SMR does better?
Re: (Score:2)
SMR fits more bits into the same area, that's its entire purpose. Just like MLC, TLC and QLC SSDs.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
MLC = 2 bits per cell
TLC = 3 bits per cell
QLC = 4 bits per cell
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, what can you do. I guess it's like the USB speed names - nobody though about the future.
Hey look, we managed to fit two bits inside a single cell. How do we call this technology? Oh, Multi Level Cell sounds cool, I guess the old ones would now be called Single.
Hey, we managed to fit three bits inside a cell. Cool, we can't really call it multi level, since it would be confusing, how about triple level?
I wonder what the next USB speed will be called. "UltraSpeed"? "MaxSpeedForRealThisTime"?
Re: (Score:2)
Aside from the theoretical cost advantage
Nothing theoretical about it. The cost comes down thanks to reduced platters and heads and increased aerial density. This is why the current 4TB WD Red drives are 126EUR (2 platter SMR), and those "same" 4TB WD Red drives were 139EUR (3 platter CMR) drives in December 2018, and their 4 platter variant a year prior was price comparative to Seagate's 160EUR+ drive.
So yes, consumers do see the cost benefit.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, yeah: more storage for less money. It's not a bad tech. It just doesn't make sense to use it in their "Red" line since (I assume) nearly everyone who buys those uses them in RAIDs (or RAID-likes).
If I had these requirements:
Re: (Score:2)
They only WD lines that SMR tech should be anywhere near is their green line and very-low end blues. There shouldn't by ANY SMR tech in the Red, Purple or Black lines.
Re: (Score:3)
The HDD industry is one where the cost advantage is pretty much always passed down to the customer. It was such a cutthroat industry that the margins were usually down around 1.5% (vs about 5%-7% for other tech). That's what precipitated the mass mergers leaving us with just the three HDD manufacturers now. None of the smaller companies were able to make a profit while doing
Re:Is SMR ever advantageous? (Score:5, Insightful)
The HDD industry is one where the cost advantage is pretty much always passed down to the customer.
You made this comment in a story about how the company was caught not telling anybody about the cheaper tech they used, and not lowering the prices, making people mad.
Re: (Score:2)
not telling anybody about the cheaper tech they used, and not lowering the prices
Except they did. The 2 platter 3 head SMR drives were introduced in March 2019 and saw a 20-30EUR discount over the previous 3 platter 4 head CMR model.
The only thing they didn't do is advertise the underlying technology change, but they did it precisely to compete in a very cost sensitive industry, and they passed on the savings as HDD manufacturers always do. You don't think drives get cheaper by staying identical inside over a period of 5 years at a time do you? Pretty much every model on the market from
Re: (Score:3)
You're literally not following the story at all.
You didn't read the article, you didn't read the summary, you didn't even read the comments in the thread?
The article has a chart that breaks down which drives they are newly admitting use this technology.
You're doubling down on some stupid "water isn't wet enough to be considered wet" routine. Read fucking something, jeeze.
Re: (Score:2)
From the consumer standpoint, I mean. Aside from the theoretical cost advantage, which the consumer probably doesn't actually see... is there anything SMR does better?
SMR drives are cheaper. As WD decided to not pass that on (the greedy liars), zero advantages for the customer.
Re: (Score:2)
SMR drives are appropriate for single drive or jbod use cases where data is written sequentially, and never overwritten. They are arguably better than tape for cold and near line storage scenarios that do not involve RAID.
Where's my refund? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
In late 2019 I purchased a WD Blue 2TB WD20EZAZ assuming it was the same technology as the Blue's I'd bought earlier.
Well there's your first mistake. Any time you see a drive selling for anything other than the identical price as previously, even if it's the same model, there is a 100% guarantee they are not identical inside. RRP changes come from changing internals, usually from a change in platter density and reduced platter / head count, but also from change in electrics.
Your second mistake is assuming that the "Blue" was some definition of what a drive is, it's not it's a product series Like a Ford "Fusion". WD20EZAZ
All Drives...? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Here is what I don't get.. (Score:2)
What you actually didn't get, was the point.
They were deliberately deceivig users. Lying by omission. Which, in my book, is a crime punished by a some jail time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why don't they just make hybrid drives out of 'em?/quote
They *are* hybrids. SMR drives have a CMR area which is required because they need to re-write adjacent blocks. This "hybrid" approach is what causes problems for some RAID systems in the first place.
Yeah, now that they have been caught lying! (Score:2)
Gold star! You're truly honorable good guys, WD! /s
In my book, lying by omission is the most evil kind of lying.
Lists Some Drives That Use Slower SMR Tech (Score:5, Informative)
WD Sets the Record Straighter: Lists Some Drives That Use Slower SMR Tech
WD is _still_ failing to disclose SMR drives that are packaged as external or USB drives.
Buy Based on Specs, Not Technology (Score:2)
Why care what the technology is under the hood if the specs are as good? Of course the specs won't be as good; shingled drives will have substantially worse random write performance. If we had some standardised benchmark number that included a mix of both random and sequential IO, maybe with separate numbers for read and write, then people could choose for themselves. You probably need to add some kind of reliability number too since shingled drives are generally going to be worse there too.
The advantage
Re: (Score:3)
Why care what the technology is under the hood if the specs are as good?
If the specs are incomplete (and _that_ is the problem here), then real-world performance can be bad in surprising and unexpected situations. The point is that this part of the actual behavior was not obvious from the specs as they tried to hide it.
These people are a problem (Score:2)
They are greedy, dishonest bastards that care now one bit about their customers. Anybody that has to be forced to employ basic honesty cannot be trusted at all. And that holds for the foreseeable future. Lying in datasheets about a critical parameter? It does not get much more unacceptable than that.
There are no RAID applications for SMR drives. (Score:2)
None. 0. zilch. Marketing an SMR drive as a RAID drive is criminally negligent and/or grossly incompetent. And while they are questioning their own stupidity, cut with the intellipower crap. It's not fooling anybody. It just makes WD looked embarrassed to put the specs in writing.
Re: (Score:2)
Not all RAID systems are about high performance sustained data transfer. Hell there are several whole RAID levels that don't give a crap about performance, and any remotely competent RAID controller is already able to handle a drive through SCT which all the Red drives have. So if you want to call someone negligent then call out the developers of RAID controllers which make assumptions about drive read and write times rather than use the features of the ATA protocol to manage the drives accordinly.
There's a
Re: (Score:2)
They have no plausible excuse for SMR tech being in a WD Black drive! This is supposed to be their highest performance consumer HDD that they make. You have to upgrade to WD enterprise drives to beat out the WD Blacks (normally) for platter drives, proving this was nothing but a blatant cash grab.