In case anyone is wondering why this is an issue (from Backblaze): And CMR on the WD list = Conventional Magnetic Recording, AKA Perpendicular Magnetic Recording.
In case anyone is wondering why this is an issue (from Backblaze):
Hard Drive Recording Technologies
For a long time, the recording technology a drive manufacturer used was not important. Then SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drives appeared a couple of years ago.
Let’s explain:
PMR: Perpendicular Magnetic Recording
This is the technology inside of most hard drives. With PMR data is written to and read from circular tracks on a spinning platter.
SMR: Shingled Magnetic Recording
This type of drive overlaps recording tracks to store data at a lower cost than PMR technology. The downside occurs when data is deleted and that space is reused. If existing data overlaps the space you want to reuse, this can mean delays in writing the new data. These drives are great for archive storage (write once, read many) use cases, but if your files turn over with some regularity, stick with PMR drives.
That sounds simple, but here are two things you should know:
SMR drives are often the least expensive drives available when you consider the cost per gigabyte. If you are price sensitive, you may believe you are getting a great deal, but you may be buying the wrong drive for your use case. For example, buying SMR drives for your NAS device running RAID 6 would be ugly because of all the rewrites that may be involved.
It is sometimes really hard to figure out if the drive you want to buy is an SMR or PMR drive. For example, based on the cost per gigabyte, the 8TB Seagate external drive (model: STEB8000100) is one of the least expensive external drives out there right now (source: diskprices.com). But, the 8TB drive inside is an SMR drive, and that fact is not obvious to the buyer. To be fair, the manufacturers try to guide buyers to the right drive for their use case, but a lot of that guiding information is lost on reseller sites such as Amazon and Newegg, where the buyer is often blinded by price.
Over the next couple of years, HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) by Seagate and MAMR (microwave-assisted magnetic recording) by Western Digital will be introduced, making the drive selection process even more complicated.
And CMR on the WD list = Conventional Magnetic Recording, AKA Perpendicular Magnetic Recording.
It's going to be interesting to see if the HAMR/MAMR technologies have their own pitfalls too, as my understanding was SMR was designed mostly to continue to drive up the areal density of HDD's...
It's going to be interesting to see if the HAMR/MAMR technologies have their own pitfalls too, as my understanding was SMR was designed mostly to continue to drive up the areal density of HDD's into the hundreds of GB's and even TB's per square inch—no one had discussed or knew that SMR would have performance downsides (the random write issues) at time of development.
Undoubtedly they will, and I suspect given the nature of the tech (adding heating and/or microwaves to the process), it will be reliability that potentially suffers most... at least until the tech...
Undoubtedly they will, and I suspect given the nature of the tech (adding heating and/or microwaves to the process), it will be reliability that potentially suffers most... at least until the tech develops sufficiently. Backblaze added some early model HAMR and MAMR drives to their pool last year, so it will be interesting to see what their failure rates will be compared to PMR and SMR drives when they finally fail and show up in the quarterly drive stats report.
p.s. Even if they don't fail more regularly, I have no doubt that those drives are going to be a fucking nightmare to do PCB/platter swaps on. I pity my old colleagues in the data recovery industry who are going to have to deal with them when they do finally fail. :/
I'm kind of shocked they use SMR for the 2TB WD Blues. Using it on NAS and archival drives is one thing, but the 2TB Blues have got to be one of the most common main system drives for the people...
I'm kind of shocked they use SMR for the 2TB WD Blues. Using it on NAS and archival drives is one thing, but the 2TB Blues have got to be one of the most common main system drives for the people who still haven't swapped to SSDs. I wonder if they lowered the standards for those drives on the assumption that most users would have SSDs for their OSes, so the disadvantages of SMR drives would go unnoticed.
Oh dang. I honestly wouldn't have particularly cared if it were just the red drives - don't get me wrong, it's still scandalous, but in my mind it's not as bad since they're typically going to be...
Oh dang. I honestly wouldn't have particularly cared if it were just the red drives - don't get me wrong, it's still scandalous, but in my mind it's not as bad since they're typically going to be archive drives - but putting them in blue drives sounds like they are just shooting themselves in the foot. I thought that Seagate was trying to do everything to make their drives faster.
Yeah, and what's more is that they're still charging just as much for the SMR drives as the CMR drives cost for years. I'd happily go out and buy an SMR drive if they were less expensive, but to...
Yeah, and what's more is that they're still charging just as much for the SMR drives as the CMR drives cost for years. I'd happily go out and buy an SMR drive if they were less expensive, but to pick on that 2TB Blue a bit more, it's sixty dollars. That's what that size of hard drive cost 3-5 years ago without any of this SMR shit (and I'm fairly certain the Blue line used to be 7200RPM, not 5400RPM). From the end user's perspective, it's nothing but a straight downgrade in every regard; the 2010s really were something of a lost decade for consumer grade magnetic storage. I guess I'll keep buying refurb enterprise drives until NAND gets up to deca-level cells or whatever and beats mechanical drives on price while being almost competitive on speed.
A class-action lawsuit has been filed against WD over this: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/western-digital-gets-sued-for-sneaking-smr-disks-into-its-nas-channel/
So WD finally fesses up. See here Not only do they use smr on their Red drives, but they use it on one of their Black drives as well. A supposedly performance drive. I was actually planning to buy...
Not only do they use smr on their Red drives, but they use it on one of their Black drives as well. A supposedly performance drive.
I was actually planning to buy some 4TB Reds, but I guess I'll have to look elsewhere. It's so deceitful, I imagine there will be a class action lawsuit.
In case anyone is wondering why this is an issue (from Backblaze):
And CMR on the WD list = Conventional Magnetic Recording, AKA Perpendicular Magnetic Recording.
It's going to be interesting to see if the HAMR/MAMR technologies have their own pitfalls too, as my understanding was SMR was designed mostly to continue to drive up the areal density of HDD's into the hundreds of GB's and even TB's per square inch—no one had discussed or knew that SMR would have performance downsides (the random write issues) at time of development.
Undoubtedly they will, and I suspect given the nature of the tech (adding heating and/or microwaves to the process), it will be reliability that potentially suffers most... at least until the tech develops sufficiently. Backblaze added some early model HAMR and MAMR drives to their pool last year, so it will be interesting to see what their failure rates will be compared to PMR and SMR drives when they finally fail and show up in the quarterly drive stats report.
p.s. Even if they don't fail more regularly, I have no doubt that those drives are going to be a fucking nightmare to do PCB/platter swaps on. I pity my old colleagues in the data recovery industry who are going to have to deal with them when they do finally fail. :/
I literally just set up a NAS with these very drives a month ago. I’m kind of pissed. . .
I'm kind of shocked they use SMR for the 2TB WD Blues. Using it on NAS and archival drives is one thing, but the 2TB Blues have got to be one of the most common main system drives for the people who still haven't swapped to SSDs. I wonder if they lowered the standards for those drives on the assumption that most users would have SSDs for their OSes, so the disadvantages of SMR drives would go unnoticed.
Oh dang. I honestly wouldn't have particularly cared if it were just the red drives - don't get me wrong, it's still scandalous, but in my mind it's not as bad since they're typically going to be archive drives - but putting them in blue drives sounds like they are just shooting themselves in the foot. I thought that Seagate was trying to do everything to make their drives faster.
Yeah, and what's more is that they're still charging just as much for the SMR drives as the CMR drives cost for years. I'd happily go out and buy an SMR drive if they were less expensive, but to pick on that 2TB Blue a bit more, it's sixty dollars. That's what that size of hard drive cost 3-5 years ago without any of this SMR shit (and I'm fairly certain the Blue line used to be 7200RPM, not 5400RPM). From the end user's perspective, it's nothing but a straight downgrade in every regard; the 2010s really were something of a lost decade for consumer grade magnetic storage. I guess I'll keep buying refurb enterprise drives until NAND gets up to deca-level cells or whatever and beats mechanical drives on price while being almost competitive on speed.
Red drives are advertised as NAS drives, not archive drives. SMR can be disastrous in a NAS when it comes to rebuilding.
A class-action lawsuit has been filed against WD over this: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/western-digital-gets-sued-for-sneaking-smr-disks-into-its-nas-channel/
So WD finally fesses up.
See here
Not only do they use smr on their Red drives, but they use it on one of their Black drives as well. A supposedly performance drive.
I was actually planning to buy some 4TB Reds, but I guess I'll have to look elsewhere. It's so deceitful, I imagine there will be a class action lawsuit.
E: they also handed this to Seagate on a silver platter. All Seagate had to say was SMR bad, we don't use it on NAS drives