
Western Digital Lawsuit for Shipping Slower SMR Hard Drives Including WD Red NAS - notRobot
https://www.hattislaw.com/cases/investigations/western-digital-lawsuit-for-shipping-slower-smr-hard-drives-including-wd-red-nas/?shh
======
PeterStuer
The Red series was originally marketed and positioned specifically for
Home/SMB NAS use. I have 4 of these (the old versions from before the SMR
switch) running in my Synology NAS for years, and a 5th lying spare in its
original sealed packaging just in case.

When WD stealthily swapped to using device managed SMR technology in the
series, they hoped that typical users wouldn't notice the change in behavior
of the drives, as they assumed a small NAS would have enough downtime for the
drive to manage the data being behind the scenes rearranged towards the slow
shingled sections.

This assumption is not always true, but specifically it doesn't hold at all
when an array has to be rebuild e.g. because of a drive failure in a raid
array, as that requires writing data continuously and for a long time.

WD was caught not just using a technology that made their drives unsuited for
the advertised purpose, but initially even denying that they had done so.

~~~
hordeallergy
If I'm not mistaken it's not the entire red series - it excludes 8TB.

~~~
nix23
True, there's a good list:

[https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-
hard-d...](https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-
hdd/)

~~~
PeterStuer
The original 2TB - 3TB - 4TB - 6TB Reds with the 'EFRX' suffix were CMR, the
later ones with the 'EFAX' suffix are SMR drives.

~~~
donatj
Update: EFBX looks to be entirely CMR

Know anything about EFBX? SMR I assume? I literally have one arriving today to
replace a disk in my single disk redundancy JBOD

The whole disk buying process was irksome because I up until WD shut them down
always depended on HGST.

~~~
PeterStuer
If you mean the FFBX (I can't find any reference to EFBX models), the Red Pro
series, those are CMS (and 7200rpm which is what the B stands for).

------
rrmm
WD richly deserves to be raked over the coals for not labeling these drives
clearly.

Their initial customer-facing reaction was even worse if I recall: One
customer escalated his issue and asked WD to identify which drives used SMR,
WD said something along the lines of We don't share that information with
customers.

(If anyone has a pointer to that story I'd appreciate it. I can't find it at
the moment).

EDIT:

[https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-
shin...](https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-
magnetic-recording/) cites a comment on a synology board:

""" Also: “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." """

------
ChuckNorris89
Nothing wrong with shipping slow SMR drives, the issue is, it was never
explicitly disclosed to the customers/end users.

For that, they deserve the lawsuit.

~~~
reitzensteinm
Yes, there's nothing wrong with SMR at all, if it's not your primary storage
device (though I doubt anyone reading this is in danger of making that choice
in 2020).

It's roughly a 25% boost from the same physical platters. If you're storing
large files with a primarily read workload, it's almost certainly the right
choice.

~~~
Filligree
Except it means you can't use the drives for RAID, as they'll fail the initial
resilvering. Worse yet, their firmware appears to be buggy enough that they're
not just slow, they start throwing errors once the PMR buffer zone is full.

~~~
zozbot234
Sounds like we'll need to add some sort of buffer congestion avoidance (anti-
bufferbloat) logic as part of storage drivers to solve this issue. It can crop
up in any use of SMR tech, not just RAID rebuilds. And of course solving this
would also mitigate the issue w/ rebuilding drives dropping out of RAID arrays
altogether.

~~~
tw04
Except the drives don’t identify themselves to the OS as SMR, they lie. So it
would be on the consumer to guess which drives are smr.

I consider that the biggest issue. Drive manufacturers are trying to charge
CMR prices for SMR drives.

------
lawnchair_larry
And when it’s done, I look forward to getting a settlement check for $2.46
while the lawyers make $18M.

~~~
gruez
What would you rather have, then? No lawsuit at all and no check? A bigger
check for you? Who would pay this? WD? The lawyers? Keep in mind that lawsuits
are expensive and the lawyers are essentially working on contingency. Lower
payouts for them might dissuade them from suing altogether.

~~~
michaelt
_> A bigger check for you? Who would pay this?_

WD, obviously.

They won't like being made to pay, but that's rather the point of fines.

~~~
gruez
That would need a dramatic change in the legal system. Either making the
losing side pay the other side's legal fees, or increasing the amount of
punitive damages that a judge can award. Both of these are non-trivial changes
to get through congress, and have numerous side effects.

------
posix_me_less
For anyone still doubting WD is at fault here, as I was (because I thought
these were obviously inferior drives not appropriate for RAID or 24/7
operation), just look at the product page [1] which is still, as of Fri 29 May
13:50:16 UTC 2020, claiming that WD Red drives are "Built for NAS
compatibility" and "Designed for RAID environments".

[1] [https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-
drives/wd-r...](https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-
red-hdd)

If some Red drives (most probably the SMR ones) require many day rebuild times
or even fail to rebuild in common commercial consumer NAS solutions, they are
obviously not viable for RAID environments and then WD is guilty of false
advertising.

~~~
e40
I recently lost two drives in a RAID 6 built from WD RED 3TBs in a single
week. That was a tense few days during the rebuild with Seagate drives.

This long time WD customer is no longer a customer.

------
marcan_42
Where's the Seagate lawsuit? They've been doing this too for years now. AFAIK
you can no longer buy 4TB Seagate consumer 3.5" drives now, the current
product line is all undisclosed SMR unless you go to higher tiers.

E.g the ST4000DM000 (which I have a pile of in an array) was replaced with the
ST4000DM004, which is sold as a direct replacement in that product line but is
SMR.

~~~
teruakohatu
Did they label them as being for NAS? This is the issue. They are unsuitable
for use in a NAS.

~~~
Agentlien
As someone who has no experience in this field, why are they specifically
unsuitable for NAS?

~~~
p1necone
They'll work fine (although with the normal expected slower writes of SMR
drives) until a drive fails normally and the raid array has to rebuild (which
is kind of the reason you use a raid array), then it could take a week+ and
there's a very good chance you'll get more failures during and lose all your
data.

------
making_things
Remember when drive makers were constantly looking to one-up each other on
reliability? Those were the good 'ole days. Bad press for consistently losing
users' data back then could put them out of business. Now they're so big that
even uber amounts of bad press and deliberately shipping inferior products
can't do that - they'll pay a few million dollars in fines and go right back
to doing what they were doing.

~~~
kalleboo
Honestly no I don’t, as far as I remember it has always been a competition on
price and capacity. Maxtor, IBM DeathStars, neither killed those manufacturers
(IBM lives on as HGST, Maxstor as Seagate). Maybe it was different in the
enterprise markets, but Red wasn’t an enterprise drive.

~~~
tw04
Deathstar absolutely killed IBMs disk business. Hitachi bought that for a
song.

------
reedwolf
Kingston is another company that got caught doing a bait-and-switch after good
reviews.

[https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184253-ssd-shadiness-
kin...](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184253-ssd-shadiness-kingston-and-
pny-caught-bait-and-switching-cheaper-components-after-good-reviews)

------
nicolaslem
I don't know if iXsystems (the company behind FreeNAS) has a deal with WD, but
their product page[0] still reads:

> WD Red drives are specifically designed to handle the rigors of 24×7 FreeNAS
> workloads, offering excellent data protection and the highest level of
> performance possible.

They probably should adapt their wording.

[0] [https://www.freenas.org/freenas-mini/](https://www.freenas.org/freenas-
mini/)

~~~
caf
They do have this blog post up: [https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/library/wd-
red-smr-drive-comp...](https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/library/wd-red-smr-
drive-compatibility-with-zfs/)

------
olavgg
The raid rebuild speed with SMR drivers is scary long, see
[https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-
avoid-...](https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-
smr/2/)

~~~
Filligree
Which is strange, honestly. RAID rebuild is a streaming write from one end of
the disk to the other; something which should be the ideal case for SMR, if
the firmware catches on.

~~~
rini17
If it is software raid (like ZFS or Btrfs), the writes are random. Plus, it's
not clear SMR can be made to accept heavy write load even when the load was
predictable.

------
jve
Sometime ago was reading some zfs issues and it was first time I got to know
there are SMR/CMR drives. Anyways, they mention exact serial numbers I see in
this article. [WD WDx0EFAX drive unable to
resilver]([https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/10214](https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/10214))

------
mehrdadn
For those wondering what SMR is:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording)

Earlier story:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22875094](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22875094)

------
boomboomsubban
I don't see how this succeeds. If you read the WD Red product brief, it says
"without being tested for compatibility with your NAS system, optimum
performance is not guaranteed." Then, the compatibility list I can find shows
the Red's have limited options. FreeBSD and Debian weren't compatible, and I
gave up after that.

Unless you can show that your hard drive is causing problems on something they
claim compatibility with, it doesn't seem like they'd be liable. One of those
times where they're clearly in the wrong, but not legally at fault.

------
AtHeartEngineer
WD20EFRX, one letter off, I could have had a winning ticket

~~~
throwaway2048
A ticket to a one time $15 rebate on WD products (expires in 6 months) 5 years
from now.

Oh boy refrain me from celebration.

~~~
NullPrefix
Any hope they will throw in some credit monitoring protection ?

------
pixelbreaker
I have the blue 6TB, but am not in the US. I've emailed the lawyers to see if
I'm eligible to be part of the class action (I'm guessing not)

------
Karupan
Does anyone know what alternatives we should be looking at? Have a single 4tb
Red (non SMR) running in a Synology box and I need to add another drive.

~~~
kevingadd
I just overhauled my entire synology array and my original purchase was two
reds and two seagate ironwolves. I ended up returning the reds because they
were disconcertingly loud and performed poorly, which it turns out was
probably because they were SMR drives!

I'm using four of the seagate ironwolf drives now and they have been fine so
far. Equivalent price point and capacity, slightly quieter than the WD. Just
make sure to check whether you're getting SMR or not - the ironwolf NAS drive
line is not SMR according to Seagate's docs that I read but definitely verify
for yoruself.

------
yaris
Is there any similar action for those who live in EU?

~~~
dathinab
Consumer protection agencies and similar can potential force some "free
exchange" program on them.

But here is the think: From the iXsystems blog post you can learn that not all
SMT drivers so lead to errors on rebuild. Just some of the FW versions do.
Other drivers might still lead to big slow downs but it's not clear if all SMT
drivers slow down to a unacceptable degree. Weather it not a newly added drive
is fresh/was cleaned seems to also affect this. Lastly while the drives are
marketed as NAS usable they have a list of supported NAS systems. And don't
give any guarantee for performance on other systems.

Given all this my guess is that after fixing faulty firmware version they will
at most provide some form of we update the firmware for you service if you can
show that you are using a supported NAS system. ...

And then if any consumer protection agency or similar acts in the EU that
program might also be available there.

Through that just my sold guess. Thinks can be very different, e.g. not just a
firmware bug.

------
jbverschoor
Are these disk stable? That's the only thing I care about. Not interested in
performance, as HDDs are used as archives.

~~~
Jolter
If you use them as JBOD, they should be perfectly stable, just a little slower
at writing than at reading. But as said by sibling, not stable in a RAID.

~~~
marcan_42
SMR isn't "a little slower" depending on your workload, but massively slower
(RAID rebuilds are just one example).

Do not buy SMR if you have any kind of write-heavy workload, or if you rely on
consistent performance (e.g. any kind of streaming / latency sensitive usage).

------
trengrj
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGcwVYbkePs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGcwVYbkePs)
is very informative around the reasons for SMR and the problems around them.

------
slavik81
I put together a NAS a few months ago, apparently with two of the SMR 4TB WD
Red drives configured in SHR-1.

Does anybody know if that's going to be a problem? Or am I fine as long as the
next drive I add is CMR?

~~~
shakna
In the case of drive failure, the RAID rebuild will probably take days, not
hours. If failure isn't something you're concerned with, or you only ever read
and never write, it's not an issue.

Otherwise, you will probably be interested in replacing them sooner rather
than later.

~~~
slavik81
I would have expected that for a 2-drive system, a RAID rebuild would only be
writing to the replacement drive. What data would be written to the old one?

Under that assumption, my strategy is to isolate these drives in their own
2-drive RAID volume until they fail.

------
danparsonson
I can't see any information about when they started doing this? The Red drives
have been available for a long time, have they always been SMR or did WD
switch them out at some point?

~~~
Silhouette
They switched them, quietly, but only for some products at some sizes. A
subtle change in the model numbers is the only clue when you're ordering.

There was a lot of press coverage of this a few weeks ago when the story first
broke, including here on HN. It looks like the lawsuit reported here is the
first formal legal action in response.

~~~
dathinab
That's why I have a dejavu.

------
homero
I was a long time loyal Red user until now. There's other NAS drives now I'll
try

