
WD Sets the Record Straight: Lists All Drives That Use Slower SMR Tech - rbanffy
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-lists-all-drives-slower-smr-techNOLOGY
======
parsimo2010
We had to drag them kicking and screaming, but we got them to do it. Good job
internet.

I wonder where they keep the voices of common sense at most companies- the
ones that realize a company is stronger in the long term if they are upfront
with their customers rather than playing games with misdirection and delay
tactics.

~~~
duxup
By the time the decision is made and the reasoning is something like money
it's got momentum.

I was in a meeting once where some new support / warranty policies were
announced. Now this wasn't a decision making meeting so I've no idea what
happened there. The policy change was a straight up violation of some
contracts we had with some customers. You didn't have to understand law or
anything, it was pretty obvious. I spoke up if only out of curiosity to see
what would happen.

Everyone with any level of power in the room seemed convinced that it couldn't
be illegal, because the folks higher up the chain made that decision....

Everyone had delegated common sense to the folks upstairs.

Often when I hear of these decision I think "Someone had to say something at a
meeting right?" but actually, I suspect that isn't the case.

Epilogue: Company got sued by customers first, then a state AG got in on the
action, then the feds came after them. The law firm hired by the company
actually quit on them before they finally settled.

~~~
HeadsUpHigh
That sounds so beautiful

------
Wowfunhappy
It's probably worth changing the link to the official blog post:
[https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-
drives/](https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/)

Anyway, this is all I wanted from them. "Here are what technologies each drive
uses, and we'll be more transparent in the future."

Now I can be confident in what I'm getting when I buy a Western Digital drive.
Good for them!

~~~
sq_
Hopefully Seagate and the other manufacturers that've been caught doing this
will follow suit. It sucks to be a tech consumer buying expensive hardware
like this and not feeling like you can trust the company selling it.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Which is precisely I was surprised when Western Digital's initial response
didn't include a list like this one.

From my perspective as a consumer, WD has turned a disaster into an advantage.
I now know that WD drives will disclose which technology they use—just like I
know that Apple will bend over backwards to not secretly throttle battery
performance. I can't say as much for other manufacturers.

~~~
AlexandrB
> From my perspective as a consumer, WD has turned a disaster into an
> advantage.

I disagree. They explicitly denied it for months until the tech press started
reporting on it. They showed nothing but contempt for their customers.

Edit: I’m never going to forget this: “Well 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. LOL. WOW.“

From: [https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-
shin...](https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-
magnetic-recording/)

~~~
noncoml
Vote with your money and don’t buy WD.

~~~
bityard
All HDD manufacturers shipped SMR drives without telling anyone, WD was just
the one that got the press because they tried lying about it first.

~~~
ludocode
No, Western Digital is the only one that advertised (and continues to
advertise!) SMR drives as optimized for RAID. The drives are failing in RAID
rebuilds, that's why this is getting press. Seagate and Toshiba are not using
SMR in their NAS drives.

------
StillBored
What is crazy about this, is that there are real technical reasons why you
shouldn't put a SMR drive (even with drive managed SMR) in a generic RAID. The
fact that they thought they could get away with this for a _NAS_ marketed
drive means that the technical people are being kept far away from the actual
marketing/sales people. You wonder what other gocha's they have left lying
about.

------
nicolas_t
Why would a WD "BLACK" that is supposed to be high performance ever use SMR?
Of course if the product placement of high/low performance makes no sense, how
are people supposed to know what to buy?

~~~
zlynx
As I understand it they've borrowed techniques from SSD firmware. Random
writes are written to a linear cache area of the drive and transparently
remapped. When the drive gets idle time it will rewrite the SMR zones where
those blocks are supposed to go.

As a result the write speed of the drive is even faster than a non-SMR drive
until the cache area fills up. If your workload does not try to write
gigabytes of random junk without giving the drive any idle time, it will work
great.

~~~
kasabali
> As a result the write speed of the drive is even faster than a non-SMR drive
> until the cache area fills up

I'm interested if there's a benchmark showing that?

~~~
NullPrefix
Could the cache be flash based?

~~~
kasabali
No, cache is reserved as a non-SMR area on platters.

------
Silhouette
This looks like another non-apology from a PR person, just a slightly more
competent PR person than whoever wrote the epic failure that was their
previous blog post on this subject.

If someone tries to steal your car and gets caught, then says they only meant
to steal your TV, and then when challenged says they understand that they
should have been more upfront with you that they were going to try to harm
you, they are not a good person. Sadly, I don't perceive any more legitimate
remorse or sincerity about fixing the root cause here than there was last
time.

The fact is that right now, several days after this all kicked off, if you go
to WD's site and choose Products and then NAS internal drives from the menu,
it still links to Reds and says (in very big letters, repeatedly) things like:

"Designed and Optimized for NAS Compatibility"

and

"WD Red Provides Storage Compatible with Leading NAS Systems"

Based on that, it appears that _they are still selling drives that are not fit
for their stated purpose._ Everything else is just spin.

~~~
gowld
All I want to see is "WD recalls SMR drives for all customers who affirm that
the drive gave them trouble, gives full retail price credit toward any other
WD drive purchase". A percentage bonus for our trouble would be nice but
unlikely.

It's not perfect, but it's a compromise. People who care get new drives; WD
pays a cost for their mistake.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
They wrote:

> If you have purchased a 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.

~~~
noncoml
Which is just smoke and mirrors. I bet you they will push back hard.

If they were here to help they would have done so already. It’s just a
distraction.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Shouldn't we wait and see what reports are before jumping to that conclusion?
I'm generally willing to assume good faith until a company gives me reason to
believe otherwise.

Expecting them to proactively contact customers and to recall all existing
drives seems like an unreasonable ask.

~~~
Silhouette
_I 'm generally willing to assume good faith until a company gives me reason
to believe otherwise._

I think the point is that in this case, WD have already given us plenty of
reason to believe otherwise. There isn't much doubt left now to give them its
benefit.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
What would you expect a sufficient response to look like?

As I said above, I don't think it's reasonable to ask WD to proactively
contact everyone who bought one of these drives, so a message on their
official corporate blog which reads "please reach out to customer care if
you're experiencing performance problems" seems like exactly the right action
to take.

So, that's the lens I'm looking through: what I'm seeing, versus what would I
expect to see from a company reacting appropriately. Right now, they match.

Now, if WD had a history of posting such explicit, official messages publicly
and then refusing to help customers privately, I would no longer be willing to
give WD the benefit of the doubt. As far as I'm aware, we're not there yet.

I would present Facebook as an example of a company that has lost this trust.
I unfortunately can no believe a single thing they say in any capacity. They
have issued far, far too many apologies.

~~~
brokensegue
When the GTX 970 was released and it turned out that 500MB of its 4GB memory
ran at a much slower speed they were sued. They settled the suit and paid out
$30/card.

I think WD ought to offer some compensation for everyone who bought drives
with worse performance than advertised. Likely they will be sued and be forced
to pay something like that anyways.

------
AlexandrB
I can’t believe they put SMR into a WD Black drive considering its
“performance” designation.

~~~
kasabali
Apparently nothing is sacred if they can squeeze few bucks out of it

------
BLKNSLVR
It's interesting that the Purple (surveillance) line are all listed as CMR
since I was just looking up Seagate's Surveillance drives, which are
apparently SMR.

Might grab me a couple of Purples as they're more available locally to me than
Seagate's IronWolf CMR NAS drives.

~~~
Macha
I would of thought the Purples would have been one of the least bad places for
SMR in consumer drives, since it's pretty much just all sequential load.

On the other hand, the Black with SMR is just shocking, considering that's
their "performance" line.

~~~
duskwuff
Surveillance is sequential write load with hard real-time requirements,
though. The unpredictable delays inherent to SMR could present serious
problems.

~~~
lallysingh
No, the write load is nearly constant. With a fixed-size buffer in the drive,
you're pretty close to optimal use case for SMR. There's no source of variance
except for where the SMR mechanism adds it, and that's analogous to a garbage
collector sweep. Size and frequency depend on dirty rate.

~~~
throwaway3563
The write load will be nearly constant but it won’t be sequential. The host
device is going to have to update file system data structures periodically as
it is writing the video stream; those structures will be at various different
places on the drive. So the write load will look like 99% sequential, 1%
random. That small amount of random writes in a non-contiguous stream is
enough to cause SMR-related rewrite stuttering, especially since with DMSMR
the host has no idea how logical blocks presented by the drive map to SMR
regions.

------
teruakohatu
I don't understand why the WD Red 2-6 TB range was specifically assigned to
SMR, not the smaller or larger drives in that line.

Is it especially price competitive?

~~~
akersten
Just spitballing, but it's probably the size range where the difference
between one and two physical platters is whether they use SMR or not. A cost-
cutting measure.

~~~
Macha
But also they've segmented away business users to Red Pro, Gold and Ultrastar
drives for a few years, so I'd imagine sales of Reds today mostly fall in that
range so more motivation to shave costs. With SSD pricing these days, <2TB
hard drives just don't really make sense, but also I'm guessing very few home
users need/want more than 8TB of storage.

~~~
gowld
There's a large market for "power" users who want high specs on paper but
don't need them. The market response is to fake the specs or make compromising
tradeoffs in lesser known specs. Often it works out fine and everyone is
happy, but sometimes a bunch of customer use cases get broken.

------
floatingatoll
Is the core issue with RAID rebuilds that the RAID rebuild timeouts are too
low for what happens when an SMR drive's buffer overflows during a rebuild?

Are these "5 seconds", or "60 seconds", or "300+ seconds" timeouts that are
triggering the rebuild failure?

~~~
AlexandrB
It sounds like at least 60 seconds. Even with no timeouts RAID rebuilds go
from a day with CMR to over a week with SMR.

~~~
floatingatoll
Okay, so they do succeed, they just take a long time. Good to know! Thanks.

~~~
jandrese
Only if your RAID software/hardware is exceptionally tolerant of the drive.

Don't forget the reason "NAS" drives exist in the first place is that several
years ago drive manufacturers added a feature where if a read failed they
would go into an extremely thorough but long (60+ second) recovery effort to
get the sector back. RAID controllers would just see the drive stop responding
to commands and mark it dead. So the NAS drives come with firmware that
doesn't do the extreme recovery and instead just returns "read error" and lets
the RAID controller rebuild it with the parity information.

If the drives go out to lunch due to a SMR writeback bottleneck then they will
have lost their main selling point. Presumably in the normal case the drive
will write the data just fine, but at a slower rate so you can rebuild your
array but it will take all week. However, if one of the sectors fails the CRC
check after the write and it has to try several times to get it I can
definitely see the RAID controller getting frustrated and kicking it out.

I would be interested to see if any RAID software comes with a "SMR" mode
where if a drive stops responding to commands during a rebuild the controller
lets the drive take a 20 minute break before resuming the rebuild.

~~~
bityard
> So the NAS drives come with firmware that doesn't do the extreme recovery
> and instead just returns "read error" and lets the RAID controller rebuild
> it with the parity information.

Hang on a sec. Is this documented somewhere?

I bought a WD Red to plug into my Raspberry Pi which I use as a file server.
There's no RAID, just the one disk. I thought I was buying a more energy
efficient or bulk-storage-oriented drive.

But if what you say is true, then the "NAS" or "Red" drives should _never_ be
used outside of a RAID because robust error correction was removed from them
by design. Do I have that right?

~~~
Silhouette
Yes, that's the right idea. NAS/RAID drives have a different error recovery
strategy, because the assumption is that they'll be part of a multi-drive
arrangement where failing fast (and allowing the containing system to handle
recovery) is preferable to avoiding failure if at all possible (but
potentially taking a long time and thus causing the containing system to think
the drive has stopped functioning properly and fail the whole thing out). I
can't point you to any specific documentation off the top of my head, but this
is a well-known position that I've seen described explicitly several times.

I'm afraid that does mean your choice of a Red for a single-disk system was
not ideal. Presumably you keep backups of any valuable data anyway, but if
downtime for recovery would be a significant problem for you then you might
want to consider replacing that drive with something more suitable for your
situation.

~~~
bityard
I should hand in my geek card, this feels like something I should have known
about. In my defense, though, the HD manufacturers offer little to no
information about the _technical_ differences between their drive lines. All
of their documentation just says, "designed for X use case".

I do have backups, that's not my concern. My concern is that _when_ there is a
read/write error (which are completely normal events with today's hard drive
technology), the drive just gives up right away instead of making a few
attempts. This could easily translate into (silently!) lost data in a single-
disk scenario.

------
nominated1
For those unwilling to disable their Adblocker, here is the official WD blog
post with PDF containing make and model numbers:

[https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-
drives/](https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/)

~~~
graton
I had zero issues with uBlock Origin on the Tom's Hardware site. I do also use
Privacy Badger, though I doubt that would make it more likely to work.

One thing I have started doing is running NoScript but by default I allow
scripts. But when a site puts up notices about adblocking or other annoying
things I disable scripts for them. Surprisingly it often allows me to read the
website without issues. I did not do that with Tom's Hardware though.

~~~
nominated1
I am using uBO. Blocking 3rd party scripts is what triggers it.

------
willart4food
> "...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."

I'd love to see the CEO read that with a straight face.

~~~
rrmm
CEO's become CEO's for a reason.

------
kijiki
I am annoyed that they missed an opportunity here to fix SMR support in the
non-GooFaceAmaSoft DC ecosystem.

Announce a trade-in for anyone who has a Red and has a problem with device-
managed SMR, with a CMR Red. Many, many people won't notice or care (RAID1
users who don't do massive writes) Then reflash the SMR reds with the host-
managed firmware they already have for the megascalers (who of course have
their own highly proprietary software management layers to handle SMR) and
sell those at some deep discount to anyone who wants them.

Announce a $100,000 bounty to anyone who adds host-managed SMR support (with
some slightly ambitious perf target vs CMR) to ZFS, bcachefs, whatever.

They come out of this looking good (eventually) instead of looking like
complete assholes. And end up with an expanded ecosystem that allows them to
create a new product family using firmware work that they've already done
years go!

~~~
StillBored
Drive managed SMR is borderline. Host managed is stupid and only worth the
effort if your a hyperscaler with a particular workload. A workload that
happens to look a lot like old school tape workloads, which is probably what
they should have sold SMR as.. Hard drives that look like tapes.

Which is why beyond some basic hinting its not worth putting in mainstream
filesystems.

~~~
kijiki
> Hard drives that look like tapes.

Tapes don't have fast (by spinning rust standards) random reads.

Hinting in ext4 or NTFS is of course a waste of time, but CoW filesystems like
ZFS or btrfs are in a much better position to handle host-managed SMR.

And a generic "SMRTL" layer that utilizes (hopefully mirrored) SSDs as a write
staging area could do _massively_ better than the dumb host-managed SMR on
these drives.

------
tracker1
Sorry, but Black and Red labelled drives should NEVER be SMR... they're
specifically labelled for a purpose... Blue, sure... but their High
Performance Black, and NAS labelled drives should not be using this tech.

------
p1necone
I really want to hear from someone inside WD (outside the marketing/PR
department). The level of organizational dysfunction that must exist for this
to have happened would be a real spectacle.

------
ksec
>Some users claim that SMR drives also do not work correctly when rebuilding
ZFS arrays,

Is this true? On the assumption of the drive Firmware working correctly as
intended, why would this be a problem?

I have not been following the problem closely as I dont quite understand what
the fuss is about. I expect HDD to be slow, so not much of a problem to me. I
only cares about its reliability. ( Which is something that theoretically SMR
should be worst, there are no data to back it up yet )

~~~
AnotherGoodName
>I expect HDD to be slow

The problem is how slow. 10MB/s sounds ok since it's faster than many home
internet connections. But it's going to take you 3 weeks to re-build a 15TB
drive in a raid array. Much longer again if the array is used at all (causing
non-linear access as it has to rewrite changed blocks.)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15623937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15623937)

~~~
deelowe
And not knowing that rebuild time can cause you to incorrectly allocate
physical drives to the array (based on AFR, size, and rebuild speeds).
Changing the drive allocation for zfs requires destruction of the array.

------
einpoklum
How can I tell whether a non-WD drive - say, Seagate - uses SMR or CMR?

------
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22935563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22935563)

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Dang, this is confusing, but it shouldn't be a dupe even though the URL is the
same!

WD added new information. Their previous post didn't say which drives actually
used SMR, and took a considerably different tone.

Why WD decided to keep the same URL is anyone's guess, but it's different
content now.

~~~
dang
Thanks for clearing that up! I've taken "[dupe]" off the submission.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Thanks, it's still worth changing the link though! Not sure what to do with
the title.

