
On WD Red NAS Drives - hysan
https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/
======
hlandau
>SMR is tested and proven technology that enables us to keep up with the
growing volume of data for personal and business use.

Absolute baloney. SMR is useful if it allows you to attain capacities
otherwise unattainable, which isn't the case here. Note that the _higher
capacity_ Red drives _don 't use_ SMR. Older Red drives of these capacities,
and non-Red drives of these capacities, don't use SMR.

Also, notice how now they're openly admitting that these are SMR drives.
Nowhere in this post do they admit that they previously deliberately concealed
this fact.

EDIT: Also note that they talk about these being "drive-managed SMR" drives,
and they are, but they reportedly don't advertise themselves to the OS as
being drive-managed SMR, as they're supposed to do as per the ATA
specifications (unlike other WD DMSMR drives which do). They literally
designed the drives themselves to lie about this.

>Additionally, some of you have recently shared that in certain, more data
intensive, continuous read/write use cases, the WD Red HDD-powered NAS systems
are not performing as you would expect.

They literally built a NAS drive which can't handle RAID, and are acting like
this isn't their failing.

~~~
magicalhippo
From the blog:

"The data intensity of typical small business/home NAS workloads is
intermittent, leaving sufficient idle time for DMSMR drives to perform
background data management tasks as needed and continue an optimal performance
experience for users."

A NAS drive, which features RAID specific firmware no less, is _very_ likely
to be put in a RAID, and rebuilding the RAID after replacing a disk is exactly
the opposite of an intermittent workload.

What they should have done is this:

\- Change the name slightly, "WD Red Lite" or something.

\- Make sure the product information page (and firmware if applicable) says
this is a DM-SMR drive.

\- Say it is intended for single-disk or RAID-1 (mirror) setups, and is not
recommended in RAID-5, RAID-6 or similar setups, with links to their Red Pro
disks for that.

That would allowed them to capitalize on the "WD Red" name as something
consumers have heard about, while also not right out lying about a very
important aspect of the product.

~~~
syshum
An Ethical company, with Ethical Marketing would do that

WD has proven they are anything but ethical with this move, I moved from
Seagate to WD awhile back for many of my personal drives, looks like it is
time to move back to Seagate or Toshiba from now on..

~~~
vbezhenar
Both Seagate and Toshiba do the same. You have nowhere to move.

~~~
syshum
Kinda... They do sell undisclosed SMR drives into the Desktop and external
Space, but they both have come out to Affirm that they do not do that in the
NAS space

[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2020/04/seaga...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2020/04/seagate-says-network-attached-storage-and-smr-dont-mix/)

------
tw04
"We've rigorously tested up to 8 drives" \- bullshit. An 8-bay synology will
fail a RAID rebuild every single time. If you're lucky, it'll work after the
3rd retry - which will be about 2 weeks later because of how slow it is.

This is a money grab, plain and simple. Had they substituted SMR drives at a
lower price they might have a leg to stand on. But as others have mentioned,
they didn't - they lied until they got caught and are now pretending like they
were up-front. Talk about making a bad situation worse. The headline should've
been "We're sorry, here's what we're doing to fix it" \- instead it's "there's
nothing wrong, it's YOUR fault you caught me cheating".

~~~
sixothree
I think the worst part of this fiasco is that the drives may appear to operate
normally until the moment when the raid is most vulnerable.

------
Sholmesy
Wow, this is a horrendously bad response, no apology, no admission of guilt,
probably written by the legal team.

I am a total layman w.r.t Hard Drives, but it seems pretty simple (please
correct me if I'm wrong):

\- They used a technology that impacts performance, that allows them to make
higher capacity drives for cheaper.

\- The technology used prohibits them from being used in certain application
context (citation needed/general consensus?)

\- They marketed the product as being suitable for those certain application
contexts, when they aren't.

\- They come out with a blog, telling consumers to buy their more expensive
drives instead?

~~~
JeremyNT
So it seems like ultimately, what they've done is to move what used to be
"Red" into "Red Pro" and make "Red" a more budget oriented line (without
clearly communicating this in advance).

The only reason to do this is to trick customers into buying the wrong product
by accident! There is literally no good faith reading of this change. If they
wanted to provide better value for the people who don't mind the SMR
performance characteristics, that's great, but that would involve clearly
marketing the line as such, not simply redefining what "WD Red" means.

~~~
lonelappde
It's brand exploitation. They build a good brand, than sacrifice it for short
term gain to rip off customers, while building a new brand to replace it. It's
very common in the fashion industry (Gucci, etc)

~~~
myself248
Sort of like how Pyrex used to mean borosilicate glass, which has a low
coefficient of thermal expansion, and is thus oven-safe.

This was the case for sixtysome years.

Then some douchebag decided that Pyrex wasn't a material, it was a "brand",
and started slapping the name on kitchenware made of soda-lime glass, which
will straight-up explode if you treat it like borosilicate.

~~~
alliao
war on drugs was their reasoning; not sure if it's true or acceptable and yeah
I'm pretty amazed it flew in the US.

But then another brand by Corning is the same, they had a range of unbreakable
product called Corelle, the new stuff since it got sold off just isn't the
same.

~~~
navaati
> war on drugs was their reasoning

Uh what ? What do you mean, I don’t see any relationship between Pyrex and the
war on drugs _at all_ and I’m really curious !

~~~
Aengeuad
I'm not sure how their PR dept spun it but borosilicate glass is incredibly
resistant to sudden changes in temperature as well as having better chemical
and acid resistance making it ideal for chemistry lab work, presumably some
news stories broke about 'amateur chemists' using Pyrex cookware for a
different type of cooking. It's not like borosilicate is a controlled material
though, the reason for the switch is likely that soda lime glass is
significantly cheaper to produce, they did suggest that their soda lime glass
was more mechanically durable but then again borosilicate glass is also known
for being mechanically durable.

------
tyingq
This is probably an archival worthy example of corporate PR speak/spin around
_" we got caught"_. SMR is pretty clearly not the use case for what they
branded "RED" for.

Wishing them a VW level wave of karma.

~~~
xattt
They’re also upselling their Red Pro and Gold lines. Sleazy.

~~~
wegs
I read that as 'for critical applications, buy a competitor's drive.' Perhaps
reading comprehension is limited on my part.

The key thing I want from a drive is reliability. I don't want to lose my
data. That far beats size, noise, speed, cost, or just about anything else in
what I will shop on. A drive that loses data will cost my thousands of
dollars.

My perception of reliability comes down to trust and transparency.If I can't
trust a drive maker, I won't buy from them.

WD just went into my don't-trust don't-buy pile.

I actually don't have any non-critical applications. If my mom's laptop hard
drive fails, that's still thousands of dollars of my time helping her. It's no
less important than enterprise (indeed, I'd argue more, since she doesn't have
RAID).

~~~
segfaultbuserr
> _buy a competitor 's drive_

Unfortunately... The competitor(s) you want, no longer exist! Here are some
facts.

* Seagate - WD's main competitor - historically didn't have a reputation of high reliability in the industry [0][1]. Its ST3000DM001 [2] drive was terrible enough to have its own Wikipedia article, which is extremely unusual for a hard drive. In terms of reputation of reliability, WD was better, and HGST (Hitachi) had the best.

* Then WD brought HGST. It was kept as an independent operation for a while, since it was required by the regulators. But now it has been fully merged into WD. As parts of the deal, Toshiba received some hard drive assets from WD, thus, Seagate, WD, and Toshiba are the only three hard drive manufacturers, forming a worldwide oligopoly. Wikipedia has a great diagram showing the process of corporate consolidation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Driv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Drive_Manufacturer_Consolidation.svg)

* Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too [3].

So what can we do? Not much. Buy Toshiba exclusively to make WD and Seagate
less powerful? Maybe. But none of them is honest in the SMR affair.
Nevertheless, relatively speaking, I do find that WD's denial has made the
other two more honest comparatively.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8355860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8355860)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11110902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11110902)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959)

~~~
wegs
There are quite a few other competitors. They make SSDs. It's a different
price/performance curve (lower on the low-end, higher on the high-end), but as
I said, reliability trumps all.

In the early days, I waited to adopt SSDs because of horror stories about wear
leveling algorithm bugs causing early failures (because SSD makers wanted to
eek out a little bit of extra speed). Speed is nice-to-have, but fast,
unreliable storage has negative value to me.

On the flip side, if I now can't trust HDDs, I won't buy them. 8TB is nice-to-
have, but reliability is critical. 8TB of unreliable storage has negative
value to me.

I mean, I was pretty productive in the days of 133MHz computers, 32MB of RAM,
and 1.6GB disk space. I prefer gigahertz of multicore performance, 32GB of
RAM, and terabytes of disk space, but it's not worth sacrificing reliability
for. A computer failure can cost me a week of time.

If it all worked, I'd have a 1TB SSD RAID and an 8TB HDD RAID, each with two
drives so if one fails, the other goes on.

That's not just me. A random computer buyer might now know better, but if you
buy a computer and something breaks, whoever makes it devalues their brand. If
the HDD makers collude to give untrustworthy storage, they won't have a market
left.

I'll mention cloud storage is a competitor too.

~~~
fmajid
Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as
little as one year when powered off. I realize disk is the new tape, I didn't
realize the hard drive makers would take it so literally...

As far as I am concerned, SMR are unfit for any purpose other than hyperscale
archival storage. If you work for AWS Glacier, good for you, but those drives
should never ever be sold to consumers.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
> _Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as
> little as one year when powered off._

A marginally-related comment: Curiously, HDDs are not totally immune to this
problem in the long run. Many types of EEPROMs (basically used by everything
that has a CPU/MCU inside) only have an officially data retention duration of
10 years, beyond the date, there's no guarantee by the manufacturers that the
firmware won't be lost. Yet surprisingly, most consumer electronics work fine
after one or two decades, indeed it's because the EEPROM manufacturers are
being conservative, not to mention that most electronics are stored room
temperature.

There is wild variations of rated lifetime in different microcontrollers, a
most common rating is 10 years, but some are 40 years or even 100 years at 25
°C. It indicates that it's related to the semiconductor process, and it also
implies EEPROMs have a lot of potential but it's expensive and/or there are
too many uncertainties to make any guarantee. How long will today's technology
last in the wild is still largely untested in practice.

Long story short, I see EEPROMs as a time bomb of the digital (dark) age.
Imagine when a future archeologist wants to download data from a HDD made in
2010, only to find that all firmware and parameters in the EEPROMs are gone,
permanently bricking the electronics, even when the platters, motors and the
head are good.

Conclusion: In terms of data archiving, SSDs are bad, HDDs are much better and
suitable for most people, but tape drives are still the real archival medium.

~~~
ValentineC
> _In terms of data archiving, SSDs are bad, HDDs are much better and suitable
> for most people, but tape drives are still the real archival medium._

What do you think of optical media like BD-R?

I've heard that the inorganic substrate they use these days is decent for
archival.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
M Disc claims to sell DVD-R and BD-R discs that are good for a thousand years.
Many modern disc burners support burning to M Discs already. They're a little
pricey though.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC)

------
ubercow13
>Having built this reputation, we understand that, at times, our drives may be
used in system workloads far exceeding their intended uses.

A use case which seems to cause failure is inserting a drive into a RAID
array. These drives are advertised as being for use in RAID arrays.

~~~
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
I’m wondering if we’re living on the same planet as these people. They
literally put NAS in the _name_ of the drive??

Does NAS drive arrays exist outside of a RAID? Is there such a thing in
consumer, prosumer, or professional setups?

~~~
wl
Single-drive NAS exists. Apple's now-discontinued Time Capsule is probably the
most famous example.

~~~
guitarbill
That true, but isn't exactly the most common use-case, though, or what most
people would assume.

WD's actions are still inexcusable, especially because the non-SMR and SMR
models cost pretty much the same. No savings being passed on to us. Pure
greed.

------
Wowfunhappy
The only thing I wanted them to say was:

 _" These are the drives we currently sell which use SMR. When we use SMR in
the future, we'll disclose it."_

Had they done this, the whole snafu would have actually made me _more_ likely
to buy WD drives than before!

But they didn't do it. Oh well.

~~~
jyrkesh
Same! And I _still_ don't feel confident that the Red Pros are actually not
SMR. Has any independent outlet confirmed that yet? Or am I stuck buying
Toshiba next?

~~~
notRobot
Toshiba does the same thing too:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959)

~~~
Wowfunhappy
However, when asked, Toshiba was explicit about which models do and do not use
SMR: [https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/16/toshiba-desktop-
disk-d...](https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/16/toshiba-desktop-disk-drives-
undocumented-shingle-magnetic-recording/)

------
prostanac
In EU we have a conformity warranty which basically gives you the right to
return the product (or demand a partial refund) if it does not meet the
advertised specs. [1]

Does it apply in this case? IANAL but my guess is that it should apply, as it
meets two of the prerequisites:

\- are not fit for the specific purpose required by the consumer, of which
he/she informed the seller at the moment of conclusion of the contract, and
which the seller accepted;

\- are not fit for the usual purpose of goods of the same type;

[1] [https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/consumer-
topics/buyin...](https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/consumer-
topics/buying-goods-services/guarantees-warranties/guarantees-warranties-in-
france/legal-guarantee-of-conformity/)

~~~
cfstras
I‘d guess that the german „Sachmangel“ would apply here. However, this law
applies to the seller - so every dealer would have to start arguing with WD
about getting their money back. Sachmangel does not apply to the same extent
for business customers...

~~~
dvdgsng
IANAL but doesn't _sachmangel_ require the seller to know about the drives
being SMR when the purchase happens?

------
bthrn
> If you are encountering performance that is not what you expected, please
> consider our products designed for intensive workloads.

It seems very strange to argue that customers should just know beforehand what
they need, while also at the same time acknowledging the hiding (or at the
very least, omission) of the information customers need in order to make that
decision.

~~~
kstrauser
Yeah, that's terrible advice. They advertise these as high-end prosumer
drives.

To the product manager at WD who is inevitably reading this: if your hardware
doesn't live up to your own marketing, I'm not going to throw _more_ money
your way. I'm switching to your competition.

~~~
magduf
The WD product manager's response: "Bwahahaha!!! Seagate's drives are crap
too, and we own Hitachi! Where are you going to go now? Bwahahahaha!"

~~~
imtringued
We can always stop buying HDDs.

~~~
magduf
I've read that SSDs can't be used to replace HDDs for long-term archival use:
if you leave them powered off for too long, the data degrades. I can store
data long-term on a regular HDD and stick in a closet or safe-deposit box and
then get it out after a few years, plug it in, and read it just fine.

------
Netcob
"We're sorry you bought your drives for the clearly advertised use. Shame
about them being kicked out of your RAID - sounds like you should have paid a
little more! May we interest you in some more expensive drives? Don't worry,
you can keep the ones you bought as paperweights or door-stoppers."

------
boulos
This is a pretty awful "I'm sorry you feel that way" response. Also, thanks to
HN for highlighting this misleading setup in the first place (I wouldn't have
heard about it otherwise).

I happen to have replaced a failed drive in my NAS box with one of these. I
just checked the logs for the rebuild time and while my array has 8T, I'm only
using 3.3T so it had to rebuild about 800 GB (this is Linux software raid on
an older 4-bay synology diskstation). It took about 7 hours end to end, which
while not amazing, is still ~30MB/second.

To be clear, this was on a Saturday night, and I don't use my NAS box for plex
serving or anything (nor do I use ZFS, so I totally understand the rage of
folks with random I/O rebuilds that have been screwed by this). Is everyone
else assuming a rebuild of a very active NAS box?

To reiterate, I still disagree with WD on this, but I'm not holding my breath
for a $5 after-laywers-fees class-action settlement check :).

------
mbreese
Meanwhile Seagate says unequivocally that SMR isn't useful for any NAS
application...

[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2020/04/seaga...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2020/04/seagate-says-network-attached-storage-and-smr-dont-mix/)

Seagate does seem to think SMR _is_ applicable for desktop use, however. But
that's a fight for another day...

~~~
fomine3
Reasonable response. WD did insane decision.

------
wronglebowski
It seems quite unfortunate we’re coming up the other side of the U shaped
price graph for HDD technology. From collusion between the three manufacturers
and a consistent push towards flash it’s unlikely we’ll see any further
reductions in price per GB without major performance hits like SMR.

This wouldn’t be a problem if flash were cheap enough in the volumes required
for archival level storage, but it isn’t. Flash storage is actually going up
this year as demand continues to increase.

I suspect there’s no ready answer for those that hoard data now or in the
future.

~~~
core-questions
You sure about that? I remember reading comments like this when drives seemed
to be "stuck" in the 300gb range, and again when 1-2tb was about as big as you
could get for a while. Now we have 16TB drives; so is there really some issue
for those who want to hoard?

Honestly, how big is your personal hoard anyway if a few 16TB drives won't
cover it? Isn't it the case that at some point you will have amassed more
media than you could possibly consume?

~~~
leetcrew
bluray quality video is about 13GB/hr for 1080p or 33GB/hr for 4K. it's cost
prohibitive for people to accumulate a huge amount of this content legally,
but torrents are still a thing. it adds up really fast if you aren't willing
to prune your collection.

there isn't currently a ton of 4K content available, but there's lots of
1080p. if you rip/download enough bluray 1080p to watch an hour every night,
that's almost 5TB per year right there. if there were enough 4K content to
support your habit, it would be more than 12TB a year.

~~~
Macha
Assume average movie length of 90 minutes and 4k Blu-ray price of $20 (I don't
buy physical Blu-ray's but found some year or two old recent marvel movies
cost about that much - new releases cost more, typical boxsets come out as
costing less per item)

So that's 50GB/20$. Or $400/TB. So the content to fill those hard drives is
about 5x the drives yourself. So it's not infeasible that people could fill
them with legal movies.

Not to mention TV shows, video games, and content that is much denser in GB/$.

~~~
mark-r
When my kids were young and could ruin a DVD just by taking it out of the
case, I put together a home theater PC and ripped all the kids DVDs to it.
There's well over 100 movies on that disk, and I still have the original DVDs
for backup.

------
hedora
They say they rigorously tested that the drives can handle 30 overwrites per
year without going into a GC storm (180TB/6TB = 30) From those numbers, you
won’t exceed the duty cycle as long as you throttle your raid rebuild to take
12 days, and don’t issue reads or writes during that time. More transparency
is needed, whether or not the product is as bad as my back of the envelope
calculation suggests. For example, what’s the maximum sustained 4kb random
write iop rate for the drive? What’s the sustained sequential bandwidth?

~~~
BLKNSLVR
> throttle your raid rebuild to take 12 days, and don’t issue reads or writes
> during that time

So, 12 days of downtime for the NAS. Doesn't sound like a very NAS-specific
product to me. That's 3.3% downtime in 12 months from a single HDD failure. 12
days of sweating on another HDD not failing during the rebuild process.

Not fit for purpose.

------
PaulHoule
When is the last time you contacted customer care and got useful advice for a
product such as hard drives.

I am wary of so many differentiated products out there. Just in case I want to
save 5 cents on an SSD so I can get a 50x increase of 95% latency. Reliability
is most important and the way you get there is volume. I'd rather see a good
drive that is made in large numbers rather than 100 SOUs that can never really
be tested.

~~~
dylan604
>Reliability is most important and the way you get there is volume.

Is that really true? The likelihood of unrecoverable sector errors goes up as
the number of sectors increases.

Reliability is only solid if you have a good backup/recovery plan being
practiced. Multiple copies on multiple formats in multiple locations. Original
content on SSDs? Make a back up on HDD and/or recordable disc formats. Keep a
copy at a friend's/parent's house. Keep a copy in the cloud (Backblaze as an
example). If the data is worthy of backing up, do it right.

~~~
PaulHoule
Volume of production, not of disk space.

As for backup that is a vastly unmet need. You have the carbonite scam that is
on the rush Limbaugh show (unlimited yeah right) the corporate backup clients
that turn home working to not working, and tape drives that cost more than 10
times the size of a drive they can back up, not counting the cost of the
tapes, high probability that you pick a bad technology generation of lto, high
probability that restore fails, etc.

The computer press has been telling people to back up for years but effective
solutions have never been there for the consumer.

------
jrockway
I didn't have any background on this and didn't know what SMR was. Apparently
the background is: people try to add these things to RAID arrays, and when
they do some rebalancing, the RAID software rejects the disk. The reason is
because they use "SMR", which severely hurts random-write performance. The
controversy is that it's pretty shady to sell a drive as a "NAS Drive" when
the drive is too slow to be usable with any RAID software.

(I will spare you my rant on how bad RAID software is. But this is yet another
interesting edge case that RAID software doesn't handle and reacts by just
blowing away your data.)

~~~
Majromax
> The reason is because they use "SMR", which severely hurts random-write
> performance.

It hurts random-write performance _after a threshold_ , when an on-disk
staging area becomes exhausted. For short bursts, the drive behaves well -- it
probably would legitimately work in a RAID array if the array were initialized
from a clean slate and not rebuilt.

> But this is yet another interesting edge case that RAID software doesn't
> handle and reacts by just blowing away your data.

It's not obvious how a RAID controller should "handle" this. The drives have
no outward indication that they suffer from random write saturation. From the
controller's perspective, the degraded performance looks very much like a
drive failure.

~~~
myself248
> the degraded performance looks very much like a drive failure.

Sure, but given the choice between "During a rebuild, it looks like another
drive isn't doing so well, so I should give up and trash the array"

and

"During a rebuild, it looks like another drive isn't doing so well, so I
should notify the administrator and meanwhile try to maintain as much
redundancy as I can"

which is the sensible choice?

~~~
imtringued
There is no choice to be made. Once too many disks fail the entire array has
to be taken offline and that's exactly what happens.

~~~
labawi
Disks "failing" is the problem. If you treat drive state as binary (flawless /
eject), you can easily eject too many drives for errors on different 0.000001%
of data, crashing the array along with the data.

------
reacharavindh
This is making a bad situation , adding oil to it, and lighting it on fire
hoping that the problem will go away unnoticed.

I have a lot of WD(HGST) (more than 2 PB) in service as of now. I will never
buy anything WD until they come clean on shit like this. They should talk to
VW about Karma and how it bites your behind.

------
d4rti
Is there a list of known not SMR WD RED drive model numbers? I have 4TB REDs
in my Synology but they are a few years old; is there a way I can find out?

~~~
DavidVoid
Here is a list of known SMR drives [1].

The newer WD##EFAX ones are SMR but if your drive is a few years old then it's
probably a WD40EFRX which is NOT a SMR drive.

[1] [https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/list-of-
known-...](https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/list-of-known-smr-
drives.141/)

~~~
phire
Except only the EFAX drives with 6TB or less capacity.

The 8TB and larger drives use the exact same WD##EFAX model number, but aren't
SMR.

------
mjs33
Did the text get cut off? All I read was some corporate PR nonsense, did I
miss the real content? Never buying WD drives again!

~~~
shawnz
Agreed, it would have been better if they posted nothing.

------
justinclift
> If you are encountering performance that is not what you expected, please
> consider ... our WD Red Pro or WD Gold drives, or perhaps an Ultrastar
> drive.

So, they're saying the new low end WD Red drives are unfit for purpose. And
boy do they have a solution just ready and waiting to go.

Which presumably, uses the older CMR (eg normal) tech to do the same thing.
They probably just rebadged the older drive models that work. ;)

------
slipperyp
As I'm WFH next to my Synology and look down at my ESD bag-wrapped spare WD
Red, I can't help but be reminded of Peter Graves glancing down at his tray
with a perfectly cleaned fishbone in "Airplane!"

------
Springcleaning
"WD Red HDDs have for many years reliably powered home and small business NAS
systems" Yes, the non SMR ones."

You are misleading the consumer and should have called it WD Pink, because the
SMR drives are a totally different product.

"If you have purchased a WD Red drive, please call our customer care if you
are experiencing performance or any other technical issues. We will have
options for you. We are here to help."

Other than refunding or providing a replacement non-SMR drive without extra
cost to the consumer are the only options.

------
arminiusreturns
You just have to look at the BackBlaze hdd reports to know WD has been out of
the game for a long time. What really upset me was when they bought HGST out
in 2012, but fortunately that management doesn't seem to have impacted the
HGST quality as much as I feared, but time will tell.

Also, stop using raid 5 people. The risk of failure cascades given the build
times on such large drives means it should be almost totally deprecated imho.

~~~
lliamander
What should you use instead of RAID 5?

~~~
zozbot234
RAID 6 (adds an extra parity disk) or generalized erasure coding (more
flexible but not so easy to manage).

~~~
aaronmdjones
Nitpick: RAID-5 and RAID-6 don't use "parity disks". They stripe the parity
across every disk, just like RAID-0 stripes data, so you lose a disk worth of
capacity (or two disks worth of capacity in RAID-6), but the parity is on
every disk. Having a disk dedicated to parity would be an incredibly
burdensome write bottleneck, which is exactly what RAID-4 is, and why you
probably haven't heard of it.

------
ping_pong
This is exactly one of those cases where the ambulance-chasing class action
lawsuit lawyers are useful. I would eagerly join a class action lawsuit
against ALL the drive manufacturers on this issue.

~~~
mindslight
So, you get your check for $3.50 or a coupon for $20 off a new WD Red "NAS"
drive from their web store. And then what?

Most people bought multiple drives at a time, spending hundreds of dollars.
This seems like a prime candidate for technology-assisted small claims court,
for the full purchase price of the counterfeit drives.

~~~
fmajid
You do not need to get a non-trivial compensation for the threat of a class-
action lawsuit to be a deterrent for behavior like this. It's the price the
defendant pays that matters.

------
gigatexal
I guess we are boycotting WD now or voting with our wallets saying how garbage
a response this is. What’s a good alternative to WD reds?

~~~
LeifCarrotson
Sadly, I've bought a lot of WD over the years. Seagate seems to be a
minefield, HGST is owned by WD, leaving Toshiba as the only remaining option.
Looks like the N300 is their line of NAS-optimized drives:

[https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/toshiba-internal-
ha...](https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/toshiba-internal-hard-
drives-n300/)

[https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-
drive/#m=111...](https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-
drive/#m=111&t=5200,5400,5700,5760,5900,7200,10000,10025,10500,10520,15000&f=2&sort=ppgb&page=1)

They also have surveillance video storage drives and enterprise drives that
might do well in the same applications.

~~~
3131s
According to this, Toshiba has been doing the same thing...

[https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sneaky-marketing-
toshiba-s...](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sneaky-marketing-toshiba-
seagate-wd-smr-drives-without-disclosure)

~~~
Tijdreiziger
But Toshiba did it on their desktop drives, instead of on NAS drives which you
buy specifically for their reliability

------
tibbydudeza
I just hate this rebranding ... Red vs Red "Pro".

It used to be so simple

Green - slow cheap, Blue - faster more pricey than green, Black - fastest more
pricey than blue, Red - fast as Blue but pricey but good for NAS

------
organsnyder
I will never purchase another Western Digital product unless they make a MAJOR
about-face on this. Western Digital owns SanDisk, so that goes for them too.

------
glitchc
They suggest moving to Red Pros if performance is a concern, but it's not
clear from the post if the Red Pros are also SMR-based platters. I have a
couple of new ones (soon to be) integrated into a NAS. Anyone know if they are
SMR or CMR?

~~~
kstrauser
The problem is that they're believed to be CMR _right now_ , but they could
change that this afternoon and wouldn't tell you.

~~~
organsnyder
Yep. Given this response, I have no desire to buy any Western Digital
product—of any type, for any purpose—ever again. They knowingly sold a drive
that would obviously be inadequate for its advertised use-case. Who knows what
other false advertising they might also be doing.

~~~
kstrauser
"We never said that it didn't have sandpaper on the heads! If you want a drive
without sandpaper, consider upgrading to our Pro line."

------
Qantourisc
For some reason I remember most HDD customers are more technical people. So I
wonder how much this is going to cost them long term.

------
PeterStuer
Has WD also bamboozeled NAS Raid enclosure sellers such as Synology? If you go
into their compqtibility lists you will find the WD Red with SMR (the
WDxxxEFAX series) listed as compatible, but with a specific reference to their
SMR KB page which just warns not to mix SMR and PMR drives in the same raid
volume.

[https://www.synology.com/en-
global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutoria...](https://www.synology.com/en-
global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/PMR_SMR_hard_disk_drives)

~~~
onli
> _bamboozeled_

Defrauded is the word you were searching.

------
CapriciousCptl
I had no idea why my lightly used NAS RAID array with 2 NAS-rated WD drives
was failing every few months. Now I know why. Last year, I was researching a
small hedge fund and found they had a heavy WD position, they cited metrics
like $/gb and called WD a cost-leader. Now I know why.

------
Lightbody
Oh wonderful. I have 4x12TB RED disks in my Synology. I wasn't aware of this
at all until seeing this post. Guess I'll be looking to slowly replace them
before they go belly-up. Unfortunately, it seems with each swap out I risk the
very problem this is all about.

~~~
snvzz
Fortunately, it's not used on 8TB+ disks yet, so you're safe.

The problem will be getting replacements for these, as it's not safe to just
buy HDDs anymore.

------
tuananh
SMR explained:

Be aware that this drive uses SMR technology (Shingled Magnetic Recording) to
achieve such high density in a small package. If you don't know what that is,
think of how shingles on a roof are laid out partially overlapping each other
- that is how the data is laid out on the drive platters. While this allows
significantly higher capacities, it creates some complexity to writing. If the
drive needs to write data in the middle of existing data, it can't just
"place" it there like a HDD using PMR technology because other data also
overlaps it. What it has to do is put the data in a temporary location, then
re-write all the shingled data afterwards to the end of the track break.

------
jchw
After reading this, my only question is, what do we do now? Western Digital
already bought HGST and discontinued it. Maybe they felt safe enough to pull
this because they know the alternate options are limited.

~~~
AnonC
I thought it discontinued just the HGST brand name. HGST branded drives still
seem to be available in the market (or some markets). Last year’s Backblaze
hard drive reliability report also had some HGST drives near the top of the
rankings.

------
packetlost
Class action lawsuit in 3... 2... 1...

------
Fej
Who got the 3.5" part of HGST? Wikipedia says Toshiba, but WD is selling
drives under the Ultrastar name, not Toshiba.

I mean, where do you go for reliable storage at this point?

~~~
hamstercat
HGST is owner by WD. They have operated independently for a while, unsure of
the current state.

------
vbezhenar
So basically don't buy WD Red for RAID and buy WD Red Pro for any real NAS
application. It's a way to silently raise prices, I guess.

~~~
snvzz
wd red pro are 7200rpm. Power consumption and heat.

------
kasabali
SMR is such a horrible backwards "technology", I wonder why vendors still push
it aggressively on users after all these years.

1\. Its performance is noticeably worse than CMR.

2\. The density increase SMR provides compared to CMR is not that much. It's
25% at most.

3\. SMR is _not_ a separate evolutionary path that can be developed further to
have increasingly more density compared to CMR. It is more like a variation of
the same technology which provides slightly more density in exchange for
serious disadvantages. SMR and CMR both directly depend on, and benefit from
developments in platter densities. When a new, denser platter generation is
introduced, CMR and SMR benefit from it same.

4\. A _huge_ portion of the drive must be reserved as a non-SMR cache area to
mitigate the performance penalty SMR brings. Notice that this is an extra area
that does not exist on a CMR drive so it reduces density increase SMR brings.

5\. SMR drives have much larger DRAM cache to mitigate the performance penalty
(64MB on a CMR drive vs 256MB on SMR drives), increasing the cost for that
part.

6\. Logic and mechanism of writes are much more complicated on a SMR drive
than a CMR one. Drive is separated into different zones, data must be stored
on a cache zone, then new data should be written into permanent zones in an
optimal manner in background during idle time, managing different zones, cache
area, rewrites, background tasks etc. all these makes the drive firmware much
more complicated. Compared to a SSD firmware it is actually worse of both
worlds: You're getting all the complexity of a SSD firmware with a worse
performance than a regular hard drive.

7\. What is even more worrying than those technical details are that vendors
are sinking more and more resources and pushing very hard on technologically
dead-end SMR technology. WD even wrote a PR piece called a "Zoned storage
initiative" for trying to paint host managed SMR technology the future of
storage and developed a linux filesystem called zonefs to back it up.

8\. Despite all those shortcomings, they don't even sell SMR drives cheaper
than CMR drives.

TL;DR: SMR is a harmful technological "drug" HDD vendors use to buy at most
few years of time in platter density but with a very serious side effects.

~~~
donmcronald
I wonder if they have a bunch of binned trash and pushing it into the lower
end consumer spaces is a way to get rid of it.

~~~
kasabali
I wish they were. They're actively pursuing it while discontinuing CMR. 5
years ago 1TB CMR laptop drives were abundant. Nowadays you'd be hard pressed
to find a non-SMR one.

------
gorbachev
Western Digital has updated the blog post after this HN post went up and
listed the technology used by their different hard drives in an update at the
top of the post.

All the backlash seems to have worked.

------
squarefoot
Are those drives really safe for RAID-1 arrangements? I read somewhere they
could not survive resyncs, so why RAID-1 wouldn't be affected, either after a
resync or a faulty drive swap?

------
j45
As an owner of Red drives, it’s surprising WD would trot out a new acronym for
in device features to a group already literate in acronyms.

It just makes me wonder how easily they believe their customer base can be
placated.

Had I known I was not receiving what I thought I had purchased, I would have
likely purchased a different drive.

The least WD could do is unilaterally extend the warranty of these
misrepresented drives to easily deal with any fears, if they really believe in
their products as such.

It will be interesting to see if the MTTB on these drives is in a smaller
spectrum of time.

~~~
spartas
Extending the warranties on SMR drives does _nothing_ to solve the performance
issues. The drives were marketed for use in NAS RAID systems, but the abysmal
performance (due to the drives' SMR) in many cases will cause the NAS or RAID
system to kick out the drive as a bad drive.

Given that RAID rebuild times are increasing as the size of the drives are
increasing, and SMR exacerbates the longer rebuild times, these drives should
not be used in the NAS or RAID systems for which that they were marketed.

By obfuscating the use of SMR in their WD Red line, WD willfully and
intentionally harmed their customers.

~~~
j45
I agree that it was completely misleading and that extending warranties solves
nothing SMR related specifically for performance.

An advance ship program to swap drives with SMR is what should happen.

------
ryall
Is anyone really surprised? HDD manufacturers have been misleading consumers
since they all started advertising kilobytes as 1000 bytes

~~~
acdha
It wasn’t just marketing. Historically, a kilobyte was 1024 bytes in memory
contexts where everything was based on powers of two but nowhere else. This
was obviously confusing because everywhere else used kilo as 1000 — a 420MB
hard drive would have been measured in units of 1024 for capacity and 1000 for
transfer speed.

When the SI units were standardized in 1998, it helped drive manufacturers
advertise larger numbers but it also rectified this accident of history where
a standard prefix had been used with a non-standard definition in only one
part of computing.

------
skummetmaelk
There really needs to be some kind of capital punishment for companies pushing
bullshit like this and deliberately misleading customers. As a bonus we would
also get rid of homeopathy and MLMs.

EDIT: Not capital punishment for the people involved obviously, but the
companies should be severely sanctioned. Possibly even closed. The involved
management should be prohibited from holding management positions in the
future for 10 years or more. Oh, and all bonuses paid out since the fraud
started should be reclaimed with personal fines.

------
sqldba
Jesus what a pile of drivel. Zero commitment to addressing the misleading
advertising or making amends.

------
mibmal
Silly customers. It is your fault of course. Using NAS branded hard drives in
common NAS configurations.

------
Causality1
WD is far too large a company to have a soul so there is zero chance they're
actually sorry.

~~~
ratsmack
It has nothing to do with a soul... it's just the nature of large business to
revolve around marketing and accounting to maximize profits, while
disregarding sound engineering.

------
dsr_
TL;DR: We know we were concealing a material fact from our customers. Please
don't sue us.

~~~
gwerbret
...except that they didn't say "please".

------
detaro
Has anyone seen a benchmark example of e.g. an array rebuild, and how large
the difference is?

~~~
mark-r
I think the issue is that with the bad drives, an array rebuild will never
finish. One drive will degrade to the point where it simply stops responding.

~~~
detaro
I understood that to be mostly a problem with hardware controllers, those tend
to be more picky? (someone I knew tried a hardware RAID of WD Greens back in
the day, that also exploded regularly because of response times)

I'd thought it would just slow down a lot when software tries continuous
writing, and am curious how much that is. (ideally, this is something WD
should publish, since they claim it's fine, but ...)

------
floatingatoll
Something I don’t understand - why does the drive slowing down cause a rebuild
to abort?

~~~
imtringued
Imagine your garbage collector runs for 30 seconds. It will cause timeouts.

~~~
floatingatoll
Ah, so various RAID systems hard-code a timeout that’s too short for shingled
drives?

------
chrisacky
Is this why my Synology 4 bay, had had 8 WD reds in the last 4 years? I don't
even use it much. It's just always powered on. Drives me insane that I have to
pay 200gbp a year just to replace drives that supposed to last years.

------
Rafuino
This HDD is dead anyway

