
Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording - guiambros
https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-magnetic-recording/
======
justinclift
> “In a typical small business/home NAS environment, workloads tend to be
> bursty in nature, leaving sufficient idle time for garbage collection and
> other maintenance operations.”

Only up until the array needs to be rebuilt (eg replacing a drive). At which
point the workload is the literal opposite of "bursty with idle time". :(

~~~
vetinari
Rebuilding is not random i/o though, it goes sequentially and that's what SMRs
are good at.

Still, I did recently reshape from 4x6TB raid5 to 5x6TB raid6. The new drive
was SMR WD Red, it took 12 days and I was quite pissed when I found out the
SMR bit. It wasn't in the datasheet, if I knew upfront, I would never bought
it.

~~~
syshum
>> I knew upfront, I would never bought it.

SMR has a terrible rep for a reason, and no one with any knowlege of what SMR
is would buy which is why they have to be unethical by removing this spec from
the spec sheets

SMR is cheaper for them to manufacture, and is TERRIBLE technology that really
has very little actual use case, except Archive storage. The manufacturers
want to push SMR for more than that because it is more profitable for them

~~~
zozbot234
> SMR is cheaper for them to manufacture, and is TERRIBLE technology

It's not that terrible if the customer knows what they're getting. It's just
that SMR competes with tape more so than with conventional (CMR) hard drives.
Many workloads are good enough for SMR.

~~~
syshum
>>Many workloads are good enough for SMR.

One workload is, which is what you said.. Archiving, what one would normally
do to Tape.

Everything else is is substandard and should not be used

~~~
chmod775
But what if you need random reads?

SMR sounds like it's great (value) at providing random read access to large
amounts of data if you only have sequential writes or infrequent writes.

~~~
samstave
Serious question: so basically wikipedia is the only use case?

~~~
tfigment
Time series historian or some siem logging or similar journaling seem
applicable to me. Maybe continuous loop video recording.

~~~
samstave
Ah video makes sense. Thanks.

------
johnchristopher
That's a problem. I have been using and recommending WD to everyone who asks
me what drive they should buy (based on backblaze data and 20 years of
personal experience) for their private and everyday usage. Even though these
are NAS drives it tarnishes the brand.

~~~
GuB-42
I have stopped caring about hard drive brands.

What Backblaze and experience show is how drives of a certain brand performed
a couple of years ago, not how the drive you just bought will perform.

IBM used to be very good until Deathstars, and now HGST, who took over is
among the most reliable. I used to be very satisfied with Seagate, then
ST3000DM001 happened, and now, it looks like they are slowly getting back on
track. Maybe it is WD turn right now. I don't think there is a way to know
until it is too late.

Personally, I like to make RAID mirrors with drives of different brands, or at
least different models. Even it it is not ideal for performance, it helps
making sure that not all drives fail at the same time.

~~~
jandrese
IBM had one batch of bad drives and a second batch of somewhat iffy drives
after many years with an excellent record and suddenly nobody ever trusts them
again. Meanwhile Maxtor put out crap drives year after year and nobody seemed
to mind. It was a very weird situation.

FWIW however I bought some HGSTs a couple of years ago that are by far the
loudest drives I've ever used. They've been reliable thus far, but the noise
level is so bad that I had to move them away from where the people are
working.

~~~
tinco
Thinking of Maxtor gives me warm fuzzy feelings. That 20gb disk felt like it
could store the world.

~~~
redis_mlc
I had one of the first double-height 70 MB drives when it came out.

It literally could hold all of the popular software of the time, around 50
applications.

I also had one of the first CD-ROM drives at work (the Japanese director had
connections at Sony.)

We were like, "How can anybody possibly ever fill 650 MB of data storage?"

We ended up mastering our own satellite data CD-ROMs to demonstrate to people
what was possible.

~~~
Dylan16807
Meanwhile NTSC is sitting over there needing around a megabyte per second to
store.

Pictures and movies have always been the easy answer for how it's possible to
fill up huge amounts of storage.

~~~
freepor
But user behavior data is a much bigger fraction of total storage use than
video.

~~~
p1esk
Source?

------
reacharavindh
Trust is a bitch - so hard to gain it, and very very easy to lose by doing
shit like this. I was buying WD/HGST drives for work. Now, I have to test
everything I buy before deploying them dammit.

~~~
stardude900
We are in the same boat.

------
prepend
It seems pretty calculated to reduce costs while deceiving the buyer by
omitting or having an incorrect spec sheet.

Would a class action suit help to prevent this kind of action in the future?
Perhaps the punitive fine will make the cost calculations that led to this
decision different since they will need to include the risk of judgement in
the costs.

~~~
sircastor
I would imagine not. The class action would settle, most consumers would get a
trivial sum in the form of a check, and the litigating firm would get a large
payout. The settlement would result in no one taking responsibility for
anything.

~~~
prepend
I was thinking in terms of being punitive. Litigation firm gets a lot. Buyers
get a $4 check, WD pays $35M or something.

------
jl6
So is the independent product review industry so broken that nobody spotted
this in testing?

~~~
toolslive
Yes, you will notice this, even if you do a simple write test with only big
writes at full speed. After a while (about 2h in our tests) these drives
become "tired". You need to leave them be for a few hours and then they are
fine again. An added problem is that the usual candidate file systems (ext4,
xfs,...) do not combine well with SMR.

Some people might be able to put these drives to good use, but only if they
know up front that it's this kind of drive they are getting.

~~~
jjgreen
I've observed exactly this behaviour on TB volumes on AWS instances, is it
known if they use this sort of drive?

~~~
ciceryadam
Check I/O Credits and Burst Performance at
[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-
volu...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-volume-
types.html)

------
basicplus2
"The Synology forum poster said he called WD support to ask if the drive was
an SMR or conventionally recorded drive..... the higher team contacted me back
and informed me that the information I requested about whether or not the
WD60EFAX was a SMR or PMR would not be provided to me. They said that
information is not disclosed to consumers"

~~~
gowld
I don't know or care about shingled, thatch, whatever, but I am not going to
entrust my irreplaceable data to a vendor that refuses to tell me or anyone
else what they are selling.

------
tibbydudeza
My understanding is that the SMR drives are like SSD to a degree that they
needs rather intelligent firmware to place the information on the disk.

At the moment everything is sitting behind the bogo SATA disk interface which
was never designed for this type of storage - rapid burst writes to the 20GB
onboard buffer area and than very slow I/O as it is emptied out.

Surely a native OS interface would be better for these drives.

~~~
nicoburns
It's worse than that. SMR drives can't do random writes without rewriting
large sections. So they are entirely unsuitable for general purpose workloads.

~~~
eru
Weren't journalling filesystems supposed to help with bad random write
performance?

~~~
tveita
File system journaling typically refers to a log that helps ensure filesystem
consistency by recording attempted operations before they happen, but the
system still has to do all the same random writes to the disk afterwards.

Some file systems (notably ZFS and Btrfs) use a copy-on-write approach that
should in theory not require many random writes, but I don't think any of them
are adapted for the large blocks you need to write to for SMR. (256MB?)

It should be possible to make a filesystem with drastically better performance
on SMR drives given the right low-level access, probably based on something
more like a log-structured merge-tree, like e.g. LevelDB.

One interesting example I found was Dropbox which seems to store data on SMR
in big immutable chunks using raw Zoned Block Command access.
[https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/smr-what-we-learned-
in-o...](https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/smr-what-we-learned-in-our-first-
year)

~~~
klodolph
> It should be possible to make a filesystem with drastically better
> performance on SMR drives given the right low-level access, probably based
> on something more like a log-structured merge-tree, like e.g. LevelDB.

The filesystem would need to do periodic compaction. You would necessarily
encounter situations where a write to “allocated” data would fail because the
disk is out of space, which is a new, surprising error that would undoubtedly
confuse some user-space programs.

~~~
eru
You could go around that error by claiming a lower capacity.

All file systems take up a bit of space to store their own metadata etc. So
users are already used to 'lose' a bit of space on formatting.

~~~
klodolph
That wouldn’t fix it. As long as programs can write faster than the compaction
algorithm frees space, you can run out of space.

The only solutions I see here are to block IO until the compaction algorithm
frees space, or return ENOSPC. Both options violate assumptions that real-
world programs make.

------
pedrocr
The Toshiba and Seagate NAS lines seem well organized and better alternatives
these days. And I guess this is all the more reason to get one drive per
manufacturer for the typical ~4 drives in a home NAS. Between
Seagate/Toshiba/WD/HGST there should be enough variation to still protect
against this stuff.

~~~
smcleod
Seagate drives are notoriously poor quality, in addition to well published,
large sample and long running studies by Backblaze - I ran a number of decent
sized storage clusters for many years and by far found Seagate drives the most
unreliable (including Seagate a rebranded as HPE etc...)

\- [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-
stats-q2-2019/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/)

\- [https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/02/13/seagate-12tb-drive-
fai...](https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/02/13/seagate-12tb-drive-failure-rate-
backblaze/)

~~~
seventytwo
Oh my god. This isn’t true. There was one type of seagate drives that had a
reliability issue and backblaze happened to have a bunch of them.

Do you realize how many different models there are, customized for different
workloads? Do you realize how many different sets of firmware there are?

It’s like saying Honda has shit cars because one model year had a problem.

~~~
Felger
I've been selling and doing DR on HDD for 20 years now, and frankly speaking,
Seagate drives reliability isn't the best.

Numerous new technologies led to severe issues like : 5400.6/7200.4 platter
dust issues killing heads the more they heat, the infamous LBA 0 fw issue on
desktop drives, motor bearing seizure on 7200.10/12, lots of bad batchs on
7200.14 ST DM001/002/003, more than WD or even Hitachi. On SAS drives, the
Cheetah 15K.x are not very reliable (replaced LOTS of ST3600057SS), but the
Fujitsu and Hitachi are not very either.

Toshiba drives are not great either. The 2.5" MK series had an important
return rate, more than the competitors. The MQ01ABD is better, but faces
platters demagnetization that leads to bad sectors. The 3.5" ACA drives are a
Hitachi prod line that was "given" to Toshiba when WD acquired HGST. They are
quite basically Hitachi drives with a Toshiba firmware.

Edit : and now DR on Seagate drives like the Rosewood family (like the
ST1000LM035) is the absolute worst nighmare for any data recovery guy. Ultra
brittle head stack, easy platter damage when shocked, self encrypted firmware
and SMR. If those disks makes some motor noise or head clicking, we don't even
bother to open them anymore.

~~~
wolfhumble
What would you buy for your own NAS? :-)

~~~
Felger
A mixed set of PMR drives ready for 24/24 usage. And f*cking reliable,
frequent backups.

Customers here often mistake redondancy for backups. Had to save a 8 years-
work worth excel file on a failed Kingston USB key today.

~~~
wolfhumble
Okay, thanks.

------
zajio1am
From WD comment: "Currently, Western Digital’s WD Red 2TB-6TB drives are
device-managed SMR (DMSMR). WD Red 8TB-14TB drives are CMR-based."

This does not make sense - why smaller disks are SMR, while larger ones are
CMR? Perhaps they just switched that in comment?

~~~
simias
Maybe they refreshed their 2-6TB line recently and not the 8-14TB and it'll
come later?

Maybe the market for 8-14TB is different enough that it warrants CMS? For
instance maybe the 2-6TB is for hobbyists/small companies who might not
realize the drives behave differently while the larger and more expensive
drives are more often use in large companies with dedicated IT who would
realize something is off?

Given that TFA mainly mentions 2-6TB several times I doubt they got it wrong.

~~~
disiplus
maybe the testing showed that the 8-14 would fail in rebuild but the 2-6 where
small enough that would pass.

or that the 8-14 where used in "serious business" where you could not fake
your way around and the smaller ones for consumers or smaller firms would not
notice or could not cause bigger harm.

------
ComputerGuru
For all the "can't trust HGST because its owned by WD" comments: I don't think
this is the case, as HGST is still selling drives that are explicitly declared
to be PMR is the datasheets, e.g. here's the HGST Ultrastar DC520 [0] which
includes PMR as one of its selling points.

[0]: [https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-
library...](https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-
library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/data-center-
drives/ultrastar-dc-hc500-series/data-sheet-ultrastar-dc-hc520.pdf)

~~~
p1necone
Eh I still wouldn't want to give money to a company that's segmented itself
into a "lie to the customer" branch and a "don't lie to the customer" branch.
The former will poison the latter eventually.

------
kup0
I would think that one would typically expect __NAS __drives in particular not
to use SMR, especially since SMR is known to be problematic in RAID setups,
etc. Not to mention the write performance issues.

It's so frustrating that all that was needed to avoid most of this was some
transparency. At least list in the specs that they have SMR. It's essentially
lying by omission.

But I'd probably go a step further and say that marketing an SMR drive as a
NAS drive is user-hostile and destined to cause problems

~~~
A4ET8a8uTh0
Agreed. I will add that the general trend seems to assume that user is a
functional idiot and keep actual specs either hidden away or difficult to get
to. It is hard to make informed decisions in such environment.

------
ashtonkem
The fact that WD is refusing to tell customers basic facts about their
products even when called is a huge red flag. There is no legitimate reason to
refuse to tell customers about whether or not you’re using SMR on a given
drive.

------
baybal2
A funny thing about device managed HMR (DMSMR) is that they extensively rely
on error correction codes to recover data from overwritten tracks, and loose
near all of SMR density gain to extra coding.

Why DMSMR became a thing in the first place? Windows! And non-upgradeable
proprietary storage array hardware.

It seems that business people in those storage companies have put big money
into SMR, but only realised that an extremely big chunk of the market cannot
adopt SMR after drives shipped. And so they simply slapped a cheap and easy
firmware hack on top of SMR drives to make them work with non-SMR aware
software.

~~~
namibj
Where can one buy SMR drives that the host can at least reliably coerce into
not using their cache/staging area? It should be quite feasible to tune/adapt
btrfs to exhibit writing patterns that don't make the drive use it's staging
area, but it'd still be compatible because the drive would start to make use
of that staging area when needed. Some way to overwrite the superblocks
without triggering SMR problems or something like that would be nice, but
that's of lower importance to me, at least.

Just supporting TRIM and exposing/documenting the SMR layout/regions would be
enough, I think. I'd like to buy that.

~~~
hlandau
There exist "host-managed SMR" drives. In the SCSI/SAS specifications, these
use the "Zoned Block Devices" command set, rather than the SCSI Block Commands
(SBC) command set.

As far as I can tell it's seemingly impossible for an individual to buy host-
managed SMR (ZBC) drives. Presumably they're only sold in bulk to datacentres.
Maybe that could change if some demand materialised and was communicated to a
suitable retailer...

~~~
baybal2
Yes, I found no reliable supply of WD Ultrastars. Just popping up on alibaba
from small wholesalers from time to time in small lots.

------
userbinator
What exactly do companies gain by such deceptive obfuscation and secrecy of
the details about the products they sell? Especially when some testing can
reveal the truth easily. It seems to be a bit of an industry trend in general,
since very old HDD datasheets would specify even things like how many tracks
per inch the platters have, how many heads, sectors per track, spindle motor
spin-up time, etc. Somewhat recently, the WD Greens famously did not specify
their rotational speed.

As I alluded to above, HDDs aren't the only things affected by this trend;
SSDs, or more precisely NAND flash manufacturers, have become equally
secretive about endurance and data retention. Older datasheets were freely
available and specified the number of cycles each block could be guaranteed to
be rewritten and how long the data would stay, but datasheets for newer flash
are basically all NDA-only and even then you won't get the exact details. At
least in that case, I suspect they are trying to hide the inconvenient truth
of decreasing reliability; software workarounds can only go so far.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
"There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter,
or cheat." -Margin Call

It feels like the first two are increasingly taken, so businesses are lazily
switching to various versions of #3. I don't know where the regulators and
punishment for doing that have gone.

------
Paul-ish
The FTC should get involved if WD refuses to remedy. To falsely label your
products can't be legal. That or class action.

------
kruuuder
I don't understand enough of the technical details in the article - can
someone please explain what this means in practice?

I use WD Reds in my Synology NAS in a SHR configuration for daily backups.
Should I be worried? Should I replace the disks with other models? What are
the risks if I keep the current configuration?

~~~
stingraycharles
Essentially they’re selling disks as “raid compatible”. This implies the disk
will perform well under constant pressure: resilvering a raid disk of these
sizes can easily take several days.

However, they have cut corners / optimized costs that assumes the drive is
_not_ under constant pressure, but rather mostly idle. What this implies is
that they likely just have a hybrid magnetic/ssd backend, which is what the
outrage is about.

~~~
the8472
> What this implies is that they likely just have a hybrid magnetic/ssd
> backend

No need for hybrids. DM-SMR drives usually have a non-SMR zone acting as a
write buffer, similar to the SLC write buffers in non-SLC SSDs.

~~~
klodolph
Well, you’re right, but technically that makes it “hybrid SMR”.

------
Thev00d00
Wow, why would they risk their brand like that. Seems silly.

~~~
prepend
Isn’t the hard drive space all owned by WD since they bought Seagate? It
doesn’t matter as much to their brand because there’s no competition in this
area of large platter drives.

~~~
Ratiofarmings
They bought HGST, not Seagate.

------
Osiris
Why are they using SMR on small capacity drives? I thought the driving force
behind SMR was for higher capacity? I know cheaper 8TB+ drives use SMR.

Is it so they can use fewer platters to get the same capacity, thus reducing
the manufacturing cost of the drive? Or is there some other technical reason
to do it on low capacity drives?

------
peter_d_sherman
Excerpt:

"However, SMR drives are not intended for _random write IO_ use cases because
the write performance is much slower than with a non-SMR drive."

Might this be a way to detect SMR usage by allegedly non-SMR drives?

Do a whole lot of _random write IO_ \-- and time and statistically sort the
results?

~~~
wtallis
It should be pretty easy to detect SMR. It's probably sufficient to just
compare random read and random write performance and look for a big disparity.
Probing for cache size and zone size would be a bit trickier.

------
BLKNSLVR
Does this mean anything for the Purple line that are specifically for
surveillance applications?

My assumption would be that the Purple drives become the default for NAS usage
as the surveillance use-case much more closely matches the requirements of a
RAID rebuild (a fairly constant write-stream).

My anecdata sample size of 3 has WD Red drives priced very closely to
equivalently sized WD Purple drives, with WD Black drives a significant
percentage more expensive (40% +).

Does this mean WD Black drives are the last hold-out against SMR for WD brand?

------
solarkraft
Are the 8TB-14TB drives actually fully cleared? I assume this is all about the
official Red (EFAX) line - I own a WD100EMAZ drive (10TB, obtained from an
Elements Desktop case) the performance of which has been a little
disappointing - I suspect it might be shingled as well.

------
solarkraft
Can this be constructed as lying? I'd be interested whether this might be
ground for a lawsuit.

~~~
TheKarateKid
It should be. It’s a very different technology being sold under the same brand
and model, and it doesn’t function exactly the same.

I hope they have a class action suit coming.

------
mavhc
Resilvering isn't random IO though, it's almost perfect for SMR, one
continuous write from sector 0 to the end.

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

~~~
dcm360
Resilvering on ZFS in not linear, it is quite some random IO.

A ST8000DM004 is capable of linear reads above 200MB/s, and a normal drive
should be able to handle the same speeds with linear writes.

I would not recommend those drives for use with ZFS from my own experience:
one of my drives disappeared after 1.5TB of writes while moving a dataset, and
only went online again (with a SMART failure) after a power cycle.

~~~
mavhc
Isn't that what sequential resilvering in zfs 0.8 means?

------
nottorp
Hmm this is scary. I still need reasonably fast spinny disks (getting enough
ssd space is too expensive, so two tiers).

Up to now I was assuming any random 7200 rpm drive will do. Apparently I now
need to be extremely cautious?

------
yencabulator
For what it's worth, F2FS performs dramatically better on an external USB
shingled disk I have, compared to ext4/btrfs. No "write pause" with it.

------
numpad0
Have anyone seen an MD04ACA400 fail btw? Wondering should I replace it with MN
or MG or just go elsewhere, I’ve seen DT being said not as good though.

~~~
leetbulb
FWIW Backblaze has the ABA model in their report:
[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-
for-2019/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2019/)

------
qwerty456127
I have got some old 2TB reds. Is there a a way to check if a drive is SMR
given its serial, part or model number?

~~~
qilo
The general rule I use is to look at the DRAM size, if it is:

* 256 MB (or more) - most likely it’s an SMR drive

* 64-128 MB almost guaranteed it’s an PMR drive

I base this on my observation, that I’ve never seen an SMR drive with less
than 256 MB of cache.

~~~
ComputerGuru
It really depends, newer Toshiba and HGST drives in "massive" (ie > 8TB) sizes
are almost all 256MB cache for improved in-memory write reordering, but HGST
calls out at least some of their drives as not only being PMR but also being
better because they're PMR [0] (it's just the most recent one we purchased for
our ZFS pool). We haven't had any issues with it (first order of business is
writing random values to the disk then reading them back to verify integrity
and check SMART values afterwards) and had sustained write speeds the entire
time.

"Designed to handle workloads up to 550TB per year, the Ultrastar DC HC520 is
the industry’s first 12TB drive and uses traditional perpendicular magnetic
recording (PMR) technology to make it dropin ready for any enterprise-capacity
application or environment."

[0]: [https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-
library...](https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-
library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/data-center-
drives/ultrastar-dc-hc500-series/data-sheet-ultrastar-dc-hc520.pdf) (search
PMR)

------
en4bz
Does this apply to Red Pro drives too?

------
skyde
What about WD Gold drives ? are they also using shingled magnetic recording

------
p1necone
So, who's the most dependable spinning rust company now?

------
ngcc_hk
Just bought 16 HGST Ultrastar ... Not sure I can believe in that.

------
mlvljr
The only two times my HDDS failed, was with WD. The first one was after the
shipping refurbished as new in 2000s scandal.

------
lifeisstillgood
I'm pretty sure this is a similar problem to Securities rating agencies in
Finance world

Luckily that problem only led to the largest (so far!) recession / crisis
humans have seen.

Ok snark over, but we have seen things like this before - take steam boiler
production mid to late 19C. This took insurance companies simply refusing to
insure anyone who did not manufacture boilers to their standards to clean up.

Something similar is needed now. Do you know why you cannot claim your
covid-19 cancelled holiday from your insurance - because pandemics are not
covered by travel insurance - do you know why? Because Re-insurance companies
look at the likelihood of pandemics and simply refuse.

I think something different is needed - I think insurance is related to it.
Basically we treat government as the insurer of last resort - but we have no
real idea of the costs we are shouldering - or the risks we are ignoring.

So what if we had to have obligatory true cost insurance? Buy a house? great
is it insured against flooding? Now you built on a flood plain like half of
England. Fine your premiums are now twice the cost of your mortgage.

Are you selling crappy products through your business? Great please show
business insurance that will make the people you rip off whole. Don't have
that insurance? good luck getting anyone to buy off you.

Ok ok it's still a idea very early alpha

~~~
dx034
> Because Re-insurance companies look at the likelihood of pandemics and
> simply refuse.

I believe it's not likelihood alone. It's a combination of very low
likelihood, very high cost event that doesn't make it worth it for most.

In the end it likely wasn't the re-insurers decision. They cover pretty much
everything for the right price, also pandemics. But no end-customer would've
paid the extra price for pandemic coverage so no insurers used it. Unless it's
outright illegal I've yet to hear of an event that no insurance company would
cover.

~~~
Geeflow
A nice example of "ensurers will ensure everything" is the Ansari X Prize
(space competition). They ensured against someone actually winning the
competition:

> The funding for the US $10,000,000 prize was unconventional in being "backed
> by an insurance policy to guarantee that the $10 million is in place on the
> day that the prize is won."

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansari_X_Prize#Funding](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansari_X_Prize#Funding)

------
boomboomsubban
Is this happening on the Red Pro hard drives, their enterprise versions? If
not, it sounds like a fairly standard hard drive company marketing move, fine
for NAS as long as you use our definition of NAS. Like their megabyte
definition change. Disappointing, but not surprising.

~~~
ubercow13
The article opens

> Some users are experiencing problems adding the latest WD Red NAS drives to
> RAID arrays

No, these drives are not 'fine' for NAS use

~~~
boomboomsubban
You are missing my likely poorly made point, WD seems to have different view
of what non-enterprise "NAS use" entails than those users having problems.

~~~
ubercow13
While they might have some concept of what home NAS use is, these drives are
literally marked as dead by common NAS filesystems/RAID drivers because the
filesystem thinks they are malfunctioning due to them being so slow, _when
they are first put into an array_

>keep[s] getting kicked out of RAID arrays due to errors during resilvering

This problem is independent of what type of workload you actually use the NAS
for.

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boomboomsubban
See, by NAS HDD they mean "fit for the rapper Nas," so any problems these
users have are their fault for not being Nas.

This is hyperbole, but "network attached storage" could basically refer to
every hard drive now and not be false advertising. No matter how unacceptable
you view this, it's the kind of shit hardware manufacturer's often do.

~~~
ubercow13
I think that’s an exaggeration. They are specifically advertised as being for
RAID configurations.

~~~
boomboomsubban
Not every raid configuration though. Just looked at the Red spec sheet, and it
specifically says "without being tested for compatibility with your NAS
system, optimum performance is not guaranteed." You'd need to find a setup
authorized by their compatibility list that breaks for them to admit any
fault.

