
Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too - DeathArrow
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sneaky-marketing-toshiba-seagate-wd-smr-drives-without-disclosure
======
DeathArrow
Trying to pass SMR as PMR is kind of pointless since HDD becomes more and more
pro and enterprise territory and consumer are shifting away to SSD.

Their customers are increasingly likely to be the kind of people who care
about this kind of thing.

~~~
baybal2
> pro and enterprise territory

This doesn't change the fact that enterprise customers are equally screwed by
DMSMR drives.

Adding insult to injury is that those disguised SMR (DMSMR) drives were made
with very intention to sell "unsalable" SMR drives to Windows users.

~~~
wjnc
I read parent as saying that trying to cut corners with SMR is even more
stupid seeing that the HDD-market is becoming 'more enterprise' on average.

~~~
wtallis
SMR drives have more of a place in the enterprise market than the consumer
market, just like tape drives. Enterprise/datacenter customers tend to have a
much better understanding of their workloads and are more able to determine
when they have a use case for niche technologies. They also have a greater
ability to deploy tiered storage with SSDs in front of hard drives to cover up
the performance limitations.

~~~
p1necone
Yeah but they need to be told the drives are SMR to be able to make that
decision.

------
canada_dry
Adding to this confusing debacle is how HDDs are now being marketed like
running shoes: one type for running, one for squash, one for tennis, one for
basketball...

~~~
dragontamer
There are only maybe... 3 or 4 elements of HDD designs worth talking about.

* CMR/PMR drives -- Classic hard drive you've been buying for the last 30 years. Not much to say about it.

* SMR Drives -- "Shingled" has very poor write performance, but adds 20% more capacity at lower costs. For "write once, read many" workloads, like archival or backups. This is because "Shingled" drives write data on top of the old data, so that your data is physically overlapping at the microscopic level. Any write must read the old data, rewrite the old data, and then finally write the new data you're planning to store.

* 5400 RPM vs 7200 RPM -- Higher RPM drives are obsolete, because SSDs are faster. 7200 RPM is kind of standard, but 5400 exists for those who want less noise, less electricity usage, and are willing to put up with the lower performance.

That's pretty much it. "NAS" drives tend to have anti-vibration sensors and
other such things, but those sensors don't really cost much and I don't really
see why it deserves its own category.

\-------------

There only needs to be maybe, 3 kinds of hard drives made today. 7200 PMR
drives, 5400 PMR drives, and finally 5400 SMR drives.

~~~
m0zg
I don't know if there's any truth to this, but I've read NAS drives also
declare themselves "bad" much more readily through SMART, so you replace them
sooner.

~~~
Dylan16807
It should just be a setting for whether a drive does 0 retries, 1 retry, 5
seconds of retrying, or longer. Not entirely different models.

~~~
m0zg
It probably is a setting. And manufacturers simply make us pay $20-50 more for
flipping a bit. I'd be stunned if they have entirely different firmware
versions for different products.

------
aasasd
Is there a trusted hdd manufacturer left? I'd like to not spend several weeks
on research when I again get the urge to rebuild the NAS.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
HGST still has a good reputation, due to top backblaze stats.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
They were bought by WD a few years back.

~~~
loeg
2012 in fact. I thought it was much more recent, myself.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
They lead the Backblaze charts since years, so having been bought doesn't seem
to matter much?

~~~
loeg
They were osntensibly a fully independent subsidiary (for antitrust reasons)
through 2015.

For the years after that: yes, it seems WD did not want to destroy the high-
quality reputation and engineering excellence they paid $4B for.

------
basicplus2
How to tell if a drive is a shingled SMR drive...

it has TRIM support

[https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/25185](https://support-
en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/25185)

------
thequux
The annoying part about all this is that I _want_ to buy some SMR disks (HM
ideally, but HA will do) to experiment with storage tech. I know that there
are lots of devices out there that are SMR internally, but because of vendors
hiding the information, I can't actually buy what I want.

(On that note: if anybody has a disk that supports ZAC or ZBC and wants to get
rid of it, I'll happily buy it off of them)

~~~
DeathArrow
Google the exact drive name and SMR. People have started to put together
lists.

~~~
Arbalest
The parents point was that, by hiding disk type, they are intentionally device
managed, not host aware (HA) nor host managed (HM), so do not fit the bill.

------
jasonlingx
If customers cared enough, wouldn’t someone just market their drives as PMR
and this would solve itself? It would make sense to have a lower cost
alternative that would fulfil most consumer needs though.

~~~
Exmoor
I can't speak for the drives mentioned in this article, but the WD Red drives
were de facto marketed as PMR since the Red line was marketed by WD as the
best drives for NAS. It'd be a little like if you went down to the your local
Ferrari dealership and bought a Ferrari only to find that they'd started
selling a model that couldn't reach 60mph.

~~~
otterley
> WD Red drives were de facto marketed as PMR

Do you have a reference? Or any evidence of customers knowing or caring about
the internals of the drive before this controversy arose?

Claiming that anything is the "best" at something is pure puffery, as we say
in the legal trade. Ferrari publishes quantifiable specs on how their vehicles
perform; WD does not do so in detail.

~~~
dragontamer
SMR is terrible for NAS setups, particularly RAID5. Absolutely terrible. Under
no circumstances should you be putting an SMR drive into your NAS.

~~~
uluyol
Isn't this a question of throughput? What is the bandwidth of SMR and what
workloads can't it support that PMR can?

I primarily use my NAS for backups and don't care too much about how slow they
are, they finish quickly enough.

~~~
cthalupa
Try to do a resilver with SMR drives.

I just got fucked by this change in models - I had an array full of 6TB WD
Reds, had one fail, ordered a replacement. Rebuilding the RAID-Z3 took over 2
weeks. Previous replacements had taken under 2 days - usually under 1.

Passing SMR drives off without saying anything, especially when that exact
model had been a PMR drive prior, is incredibly anti-customer.

~~~
otterley
The model number did change. The older drive was a WD60EFRX; the newer SMR
drive is a WD60EFAX. Am I mistaken?

~~~
dragontamer
What's going on, is that WD has for years, sold a PMR 3TB drive called "3TB WD
Red".

Suddenly, without warning, the "3TB WD Red" is an SMR drive. Technically they
changed the model number, but the marketing number (3 TB Red) remained the
same.

------
p1mrx
They should just sell PMR drives, with an option to enable SMR mode for extra
capacity.

~~~
marcan_42
Not possible. Modern drives require precision external equipment to write the
servo markers, you can't "low level format" a modern drive and haven't been
able to for about two decades. Changing from SMR to PMR would require
rewriting the servo tracks for the different density.

------
fendy3002
So does this happened because the rising adaptation of SSD or it's bound to
happen after all for HDD to cutting cost?

~~~
lonelappde
It's competition. Every cost cutting tech gets adoption except for boost the
main muggle specs like capacity.

On the SSD side we have DRAMless and TLC.

The annoying thing is that unless the government forces disclosure, the honest
manufacturers are the ones hurt, having to start advertising "no SMR!" to
differentiate, like the organic/health food products in the grocery store that
have to list all the poisons they don't have.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
> _On the SSD side we have DRAMless and TLC._

I'm happy to buy a DRAMless + TLC SSD for my boot disk on my web browsing PC
(not development), it is a reasonable compromise for a lower price. Same for
SMR drives, I won't have problems with them as backup disks.

I think the problem here is SMR drives are sold _without disclosure_ , and it
has already created some serious problems in practice.

> What’s worse, they’re shipping DM-SMR drives as “RAID” and “NAS” drives This
> is causing MAJOR problems – such as the latest iteration of WD REDs
> (WDx0EFAX replacing WDx0EFRX) being unable to be used for rebuilding
> RAID[56] or ZFS RAIDZ sets: They rebuiild for a while (1-2 hours), then
> throw errors and get kicked out of the set.

~~~
magicalhippo
> They rebuiild (sic) for a while (1-2 hours), then throw errors and get
> kicked out of the set.

I don't doubt it, but do you have the source for that? I read stories about
people using the Seagate Archive disks in RAIDZ and it worked fine for them.

~~~
cthalupa
Mine completed the rebuild, but it took over 2 weeks vs. the usual 1-2 days my
prior WD Red 6TBs had completed in.

This has accelerated my move to enterprise 16TB drives, because I really don't
want to expose myself to data loss on rebuilds taking hugely extended times.

~~~
zozbot234
> Mine completed the rebuild, but it took over 2 weeks vs. the usual 1-2 days

This also means you'll need a lot more HD's per RAID set to guard against
multiple failures during rebuild. Which means that even the supposed data
density/space advantage of SMR is moot - you'd be better off with PMR.

------
LeifCarrotson
Is there any way small-scale ~4 drive NAS or file server systems can
accommodate SMR drives in software? It looks like they're going to need to do
so...

~~~
toast0
It would really be best if the drive properly identified itself, so the host
os/filesystem could adapt to the drive parameters.

That said, you would want to use a log structured filesystem, with a
compaction feature. You want to avoid read-modify-write on the shingled areas,
it's time intesive and competes with other I/O.

~~~
loeg
You don't need a single Log structure -- the shingle stripes are on the order
of 128 MB of or so. Any CoW filesystem can relatively easily adapt to this
kind of system; in-place filesystems are basically boned on SMR. The CoW
filesystem aren't going to be fast on SMR, mind you, just not quite as awful.

~~~
seized
Except filesystems like ZFS are having issues on these SMR Reds during
resilvers (rebuilds) because SMR slows down so much.

~~~
loeg
Toast0's great-grandparent comment (and my grandparent comment) are talking
about Host-managed SMR, not "transparent" drive-managed SMR like these
fraudulent WD Reds.

Yes, nothing except extremely low load or extremely linear (i.e., security
video / tape-style backup) workflows works well with drive-managed SMR.

~~~
ngcc_hk
storage drive recycle after certain period and hence it is good for the first
write but after that as those (and then as which support it) would need to
assume low load environment. May be ok, just if we can tell we can test.

------
cmurf
I'm not sure about how to moderate the reported DMSMR behaviors reported in
this thread.

But I wonder if folks are better off buying host managed or host aware drives
instead, and pairing it with either dm-zoned and their preferred file system;
or a file system that supports ZBC and ZAC natively (Btrfs does, I'm not sure
about others).

Note that dm-zoned has significant changes starting with kernel 5.5.

[https://zonedstorage.io/linux/dm/#](https://zonedstorage.io/linux/dm/#)

------
otterley
Are the disk vendors publishing performance metrics that are being violated by
the use of SMR technology? Or is this just one of those cases of performance
generally not being as good as it used to be, and customers becoming reliant
on past behavior despite the lack of an explicit performance promise from the
vendors?

~~~
dragontamer
> Are the disk vendors publishing performance metrics that are being violated
> by the use of SMR technology?

Not really, no. SMR drives overlays data on top of each other, like "shingles"
on a typical American roof.

As such, whenever an SMR drive writes data, it must read the data "underneath"
the current spot, rewrite the "underneath" data, and then lay the new data on
top of it.

SMR drives are great for archives (write once, read many). But they're pretty
much useless to the typical consumer. SMR drives should be avoided if you're
building your own computer.

~~~
otterley
I think the real answer here is to demand that disk manufacturers publish
performance specifications. This leaves them free to change implementation
details (which consumers usually don't know or care about) as long as the
published specifications are accurate.

~~~
dragontamer
For literally years, people bought WD Red drives, DESPITE being more
expensive, because they had higher performance.

WD Blue drives had SMR / Shingles in them. WD Green drives were shoddy, low
quality, and had issues with RAID Rebuilds. WD Red commanded a high price, but
came with higher quality.

What's happened here, is that WD has begun to sell low-performance drives
under their high-priced "Red" brand.

------
Havoc
Can't say I particularly care frankly. I don't see myself buying another
spinning plate of rust

~~~
segfaultbuserr
How do you backup your motionless piles of sand, then? /joke

Perhaps all the data you care is on the cloud, but HDDs are still important
for backups. Although it's the most acceptable scenario to use an inferior SMR
disk. The real issue of SMR is RAID/servers, which, of course, is what the
cloud is made of...

~~~
speedgoose
I do my backups in the cloud, which uses hard drives for slow storage but I
couldn't care less about it. The terrible reliability and performances are not
my problem anymore.

~~~
jennyyang
What if you lose your job and can't afford to keep paying the monthly fees, or
there is corruption in your backup? You won't know until you perform a
disaster recovery.

~~~
speedgoose
If I lose my job I get notified in advance and then I get unemployment
benefits for years. It's more than enough time to find a new job before I
don't have enough savings to justify cloud storage costs.

What if you connect your hard-drive and the data is corrupted or the drive
isn't spinning? That did happen to me. I rather have people replacing the hard
drives for me. Uploading corrupted backups to the cloud is the same than
saving corrupted backups locally.

