Why do they need to create another line? So now RED line exists for NAS but cannot be used for NAS? Only one drive NAS or a NAS that never needs to recover and why not call that something else?
IMO they should have just apologized and said we could have done better. Now it seems they are counting on ignorance of some poor souls.
If we're going to be extremely generous to WD, those SMR Red drives do have the vibration sensors and soforth for NAS operations. The drives do "better" outside of ZFS workload, and there are single bay NAS units. (NAS does not have to mean RAID, although in most cases it does) The original seagate archive V2s were actually pretty good for the money if you used them as single drives, didn't need availability and had practical backup arrangements.
I'm being extremely generous to WD there. Quietly swapping CMR to SMR, charging the same for them and doing their best not to tell anybody is an extremely dubious tactic. However if they had - Sold these as a Red Lite or Red "solo" rather than rebrand the CMRs are Red Plus. - Been clear what they are good for, and what they aren't good for - Passed on a meaningful price reduction to the consumer Then I think we'd have a lot more nice things to say...
I agree. Unfortunately with this move by making "the old" as plus puts a very bad taste in my mouth. I was one of those unfortunates buying the SMR disks (four 6tb). I returned them but I was lucky. What if I didn't read about them in time, and somehow in the future I screwed up my data. The monopoly on disks looks a bit too scary now.
If Synology's HDD compatibility list is to be trusted, the WD Red's with DR-SMR do not have vibration sensors. I don't have one of those SMR-Red's (fortunately), so i can't take a look and verify whether Synology's statement about the lack of vibration sensors is indeed correct.
I don't know what you would use an external hard drive for - Me, I use it for archival purposes, as in writing backup images. That means I am using the drives for write once 100 to 200GB data sets, that, apart from the verify read, will, I hope never be read. as in - if I need to read that data, then the system they are an archive from would have been corrupted, or the drive in the system failed. So if the data write from the RAM cache is to a temporary location, and then that is reported as a verified write - then the system, app, and I would assume the data is now safely on it's position on the hard drive. (unless I waste time and effort running a defrag on the drive). then the drive will read that data from the temp space, and write it to the shingled track, and then verify that? Maybe not reporting the verify failed several days after the OS partition image was taken - well the system would have been powered off after the archive was completed without reported error.
So Shingled drive would not only actually take 4 track revolutions for the non shingled 1 and a bit, but also defeated the validation process and thus the reliance I put on the backup to the external drive - and with a cycle of drives, maybe I wouldn't find out the backup was unreadable until a month or so later when the drive gets powered up and can do the try to complete the move of the 200GB from the temp to the permanent location.
Two questions: what about pricing? And, what about the other two (Seagate and Toshiba), who pulled a similar stunt? Although, yes, WD's was especially onerous, given that Red drives are widely used in NAS.
What about the other two? It's rather simple: All companies are shitty. And i always choose the most shitty company to purchase from. Wait, no. I don't do that. I prefer to not reward the most shitty company amongst them and refrain from purchasing their products. Amongst shitty companies, i tend to purchase from the least shitty (or which is most capable of hiding their shit from my view, if you will). But that's just me...
7200 RPM is considered high-performance? That just goes to show how far we have lowered our expectations. When I was speccing and building storage, 7200 RPM was considered "near-line" storage, not to be used for any heavily interactive applications. 10K was the normal spec, and 15K for top-end server arrays.
5400 RPM CMR is darn-near unusable. I can only imagine the level of suckage produced by 5400 RPM SMR drives. Ugh.
I think the 10k and 15k drives are no longer viable, with SSD filling their roles. I for one have abandoned HDDs and gone to full SSD storage. The cost premium for QLC SSD is now lower than the labor and reduced array performance on HDD array rebuilds.
Maybe at data centers these HHD still makes sense. But for my use, QLC SSD array works much more reliably and faster at everything an SOHO/SMB duty cycle can throw at it.
Seriously, when is the last time you saw a Raptor HDD? I think they capped out at 600GB and even at <$100, you can get an enterprise SSD at that capacity for about that price.
Last time I saw a Raptor was last year when I oversaw destruction of some long ago decommissioned desktop PCs. Raptors were sorta cool back in 2003-2005 (or so) when they debuted, if you discounted the small capacities, high price, high noise and high temps.
The talk here is about server grade hard drives, where 10k drives existed long before WD started to sell Raptors for end users.
I'd like to know which 600GB *ENTERPRISE* SSDs you can get for <$100 and what your definition for ENTERPRISE grade is.
Raptors were quite common in enterprise up until just a few years ago. The HP Z440 workstations at a client of mine have HP OEM Raptor 600GB drives and they are common in previous generation ThinkStation's as well.
Besides, nobody said Raptors were enterprise-grade drives. I simply compared them to something in that realm of reliability by mentioning an MLC-based SSD (which is mostly delegated to enterprise SSD's)
Sandisk CloudSpeed SSD's retail for $129 @ 400GB and $199 @ 600GB. They regularly sell for half that, especially the ECO models (you can pickup 1.92GB ECO's lightly used for <$200)
I really don't know why you were so hostile at unjustly implying ignorance in my post.
Stull own two velocity raptor hds... good stuff, but yeah the price vs speed is not part with lowend ssd any more! But both the 150gb and 600gb versions still works like a charm, so They were made well!
"Raptors were quite common in enterprise up until just a few years ago."
Perhaps that's a regional thing since I honestly haven't seen Raptors even in the last decade. HP didn't offer Z440 with Raptors, the last model to have Raptors as an option was the first generation Z (Z400), released in 2009, after which they started to offer SSD's instead when Intel et al. had started to commoditize SSD.
"I really don't know why you were so hostile at unjustly implying ignorance in my post."
Pardon. Perhaps I was in snarky mood but this forum seems to garner a lot of consumers posting about their experiences with consumer gear, prosumer at best. PEJUman wrote about '10k and 15k drives' which implies SAS drives and your Raptor comment was therefore out of scope.
Sigh. Not sure where you get this data from. I literally work for multinational corporations that have machines from the last few years with OEM VelociRaptors, specifically Z230 (Haswell/2014) on the low-end of the scale and even HP Z1 G2 AIO's (actually newer than the Z440's I previously mentioned) all have 1TB models (WD1000DHTZ) IN AN ALL IN ONE CHASSIS.
They are a lot more common than you believe - partially due to traditional IT departments being cautious about constantly evolving SSD technology. That has obviously shifted dramatically in the last 5 or so years as the Z440 and Z1 G2 are the last chassis generations I know of that had them from HP. Lenovo ThinkStations, especially in international markets, had VelociRaptors up until very recently paired with Optane (which was a remarkably good combination for capacity\performance\reliability.) The only reason I believe HP shifted focus away from Raptors in their workstations was to promote their own Z Turbo Drive that by no coincidence launched with the discontinuation of VelociRaptors.
Sigh, I get them from HP Quickspecs, which list the factory configurations. I too, work with multinational (intercontinental) corps and with/for system integrator. I've been HP for the last 20 years.
HP had Raptors available as an option, no disagreement there.
"Seriously, when is the last time you saw a Raptor HDD? I think they capped out at 600GB [...]" "[...]all have 1TB models (WD1000DHTZ) IN AN ALL IN ONE CHASSIS."
Your original statement conflicts greatly with your later reply.
"HP shifted focus away from Raptors in their workstations was to promote their own Z Turbo Drive"
WD introduced the final Raptor generation in 2012 and the SATA SSDs trounced them in all benchmarks, except $/GB - and the SSD's were rapidly getting cheaper. Raptors were obsolete.
I don't think the Z Turbo had anything to do with Raptors' demise since it's in a class of its own and HP still offers 15k SAS drives for workstations if you really need spinning rust.
Technical type on the 600GB cap. Those were the models most common on CTO's but 1TB drives are in numerous factory configs, and of course available in CTO's.
Your last statement conflicts with the fact other OEM's were using Raptors with Optane up until recently. I don't think there was a 'demise' or obsolescence in 2012. HDD's still outship SSD's by a huge margin to this day in office PC's.
"HDD's still outship SSD's by a huge margin to this day in office PC's."
Any references to back this?
The few marketshare statistics I could find claim that SSD's are on par with HDD's in number of units sold, though Office PC's are not specifically mentioned. Laptops have been mostly SSD's for several years now, and the desktop procurements I've been involved with have mostly been SSD's since a base 128GB/256GB unit (for example) is inexpensive and quite enough for most office use. YMMV.
Ofcourse They Are more expensive, They did use that not so good in nas usage version to reduce prices, that is Also why people did buy those. They did have better price/capasity than previous versions.
I agree completely with mmrezaie. Why even have a "NAS Hard Drive" that is inherently a poor choice for most NAS configs? Why wreck the Red branding which formerly (to NAS noobs like me) meant "good for NAS - buy this and you'll be OK"? Now Red means "go figure out if you'd even want this in the system".
Because consumer/SOHO NAS HDD's, especially those with lower-capacities, have no noteworthy future in the market. The writing is on the wall, consumers will either migrate to cloud or SSD-based storage. Obviously, for HDD vendors prefer if consumers will rather transition to cloud instead to SSDs, because guess what that storage in the cloud data centers is made of...
Problem with cloud is that most broadband providers upload speed is vastly lower then the quoted download. for a 100GB image upload that may well take several days - so a USB is a reasonable choice - but... what drive is in the Seagate branded USB case - well you'll find out when you start using the drive and query the OS as to what the hardware is - and it is then that you can check the limits to the warrantee - maybe a whole 2400 hours of use on the shingularly slow drive.
Sometimes I think Sandisk is running WD's marketing. These are tactics that Sandisk (and to a lesser extent - Kingston) have been exploiting for at least a decade: dramatically changing the internal hardware of a product model without mention.
For example: the Sandisk SSD Plus came in 3 versions; 2 different controller configurations and 3 different NAND types (only one of which is MLC) and while the performance metrics are firmware tweaked to meet their 'up to' marketing requirements, the sustained performance and DWPD were all over the place between models. Since they never disclosed sustained performance or DWPD, instead relying on burst performance (which is a bs metric since its limited by SATA in every modern SSD anyway) and MTBF (another bs metric for obvious reasons, a remnant of predicted hard disk "determined reliability")
WD, distance yourself from Sandisk, they're going to sink you.
Are they now going to charge more for these? If they charge more for the WD30EFRX WD Red Plus than I paid for my current WD30EFRX WD Red drives, this is just a money grab.
I was also lucky to completely bypass these SMR drives.
What they have committed there is quite simply fraud. HDDs are block addressable devices that will have both the natural block and seek overheads, but otherwise have constant latencies on updates.
SMR are *specific purpose* devices, meant for markets, who understand how they trade in-place update overhead for higher capacity at a given price point.
To let this storage class lose on customers who might put these into ZFS or RAID5/6 appliances and then suffer unexplainable and hard to explain write amplification is quite simply a criminal offense.
Leniency in this case is not only undeserved: Punitive action must be so scary, no bean-counter ever tries to take a similar route.
Because the damage inflicted on affected puchasers of these drives is hundreds of times bigger than the value of these devices.
To think that this is the company that Martin Fink is now working for: The shame must be taking 10 years from his life. Whoever let this happen basically invalidated everything he's done for the company and the life-time work of many more WD engineers, who gave their hearts for a superior product only to be failed by people who probably thought themselves smart.
Very Volkswagen to me and I am a German driving Ford.
Now anyone seeking to "upgrade" an existing WD Red drive, who doesn't research exactly what they're getting (because why would you — WD Red was working just fine) gets stuck with SMR. And what's next? Is WD going to downgrade Gold and make a "Gold Plus"? "Black Plus"?
The only thing this cleans up is the idea that WD's branding is worth anything. I'll be sticking with companies that don't play games with their established and trusted brands to sell inferior technology to customers who don't know the difference, thank-you-very-much. There's absolutely a place for SMR, and the low capacity drives in the long-established and (formerly) trusted WD Red line are most certainly not it.
Following on from my 2 earlier replies - I have managed to get a link to the page detailing the SMR or CMR' ness of the Seagate current (as at whenever) drives. that contains a note to check the current status as the status detailed may change. From that it seems that for CMR one should buy Ironwolf or BarraCuda-Pro drives rather than barraCuda ones HOWEVER - there seems to be NO indication as to what drive is in which of the USB cased expansion and 'Backup' storage offerings. So - which from which companies will you be getting your backup and long-term archive storage. Anyone know of a good storage facility for a collection of bare 3.5 and 2.5 drives if I go for a USB-3.0 or USB-c connecting slot-the-drive-in caddy for the backups.
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mmrezaie - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Why do they need to create another line? So now RED line exists for NAS but cannot be used for NAS? Only one drive NAS or a NAS that never needs to recover and why not call that something else?IMO they should have just apologized and said we could have done better. Now it seems they are counting on ignorance of some poor souls.
thewishy - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
If we're going to be extremely generous to WD, those SMR Red drives do have the vibration sensors and soforth for NAS operations. The drives do "better" outside of ZFS workload, and there are single bay NAS units. (NAS does not have to mean RAID, although in most cases it does)The original seagate archive V2s were actually pretty good for the money if you used them as single drives, didn't need availability and had practical backup arrangements.
I'm being extremely generous to WD there. Quietly swapping CMR to SMR, charging the same for them and doing their best not to tell anybody is an extremely dubious tactic. However if they had
- Sold these as a Red Lite or Red "solo" rather than rebrand the CMRs are Red Plus.
- Been clear what they are good for, and what they aren't good for
- Passed on a meaningful price reduction to the consumer
Then I think we'd have a lot more nice things to say...
mmrezaie - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
I agree. Unfortunately with this move by making "the old" as plus puts a very bad taste in my mouth. I was one of those unfortunates buying the SMR disks (four 6tb). I returned them but I was lucky. What if I didn't read about them in time, and somehow in the future I screwed up my data. The monopoly on disks looks a bit too scary now.MrVibrato - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Well, it seems you are way too generous...If Synology's HDD compatibility list is to be trusted, the WD Red's with DR-SMR do not have vibration sensors. I don't have one of those SMR-Red's (fortunately), so i can't take a look and verify whether Synology's statement about the lack of vibration sensors is indeed correct.
leexgx - Thursday, June 25, 2020 - link
only the WD Pro or any seagate ironwolf have RV sensorsWD red SMR CMR plus 5400rpm (what ever) don't have RV sensors as to why they cannot be used in Plus 8 bays
69369369 - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Wankers.jamies - Tuesday, October 13, 2020 - link
I don't know what you would use an external hard drive for -Me, I use it for archival purposes, as in writing backup images.
That means I am using the drives for write once 100 to 200GB data sets, that, apart from the verify read, will, I hope never be read. as in - if I need to read that data, then the system they are an archive from would have been corrupted, or the drive in the system failed.
So if the data write from the RAM cache is to a temporary location, and then that is reported as a verified write - then the system, app, and I would assume the data is now safely on it's position on the hard drive. (unless I waste time and effort running a defrag on the drive).
then the drive will read that data from the temp space, and write it to the shingled track, and then verify that?
Maybe not reporting the verify failed several days after the OS partition image was taken - well the system would have been powered off after the archive was completed without reported error.
So Shingled drive would not only actually take 4 track revolutions for the non shingled 1 and a bit, but also defeated the validation process and thus the reliance I put on the backup to the external drive - and with a cycle of drives, maybe I wouldn't find out the backup was unreadable until a month or so later when the drive gets powered up and can do the try to complete the move of the 200GB from the temp to the permanent location.
eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Two questions: what about pricing? And, what about the other two (Seagate and Toshiba), who pulled a similar stunt? Although, yes, WD's was especially onerous, given that Red drives are widely used in NAS.MrVibrato - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
What about the other two? It's rather simple: All companies are shitty. And i always choose the most shitty company to purchase from. Wait, no. I don't do that. I prefer to not reward the most shitty company amongst them and refrain from purchasing their products. Amongst shitty companies, i tend to purchase from the least shitty (or which is most capable of hiding their shit from my view, if you will). But that's just me...eldakka - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
What stunt did the other two pull? Neither of them put SMR drives into their NAS lines. They did put SMR drives into Desktop lines, but not NAS.Gigaplex - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Silently putting SMR into their Desktop lines is a similarly shitty stunt.RSAUser - Monday, July 6, 2020 - link
Not even close, NAS use case is quite different if it's designed for ZFS.silencer12 - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
You will need to wait for western digital to announce prices.danjw - Thursday, June 25, 2020 - link
Neither tried selling SMR drives as NAS drives. They included the information on spec sheets for their drives, I believe.mark625 - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
7200 RPM is considered high-performance? That just goes to show how far we have lowered our expectations. When I was speccing and building storage, 7200 RPM was considered "near-line" storage, not to be used for any heavily interactive applications. 10K was the normal spec, and 15K for top-end server arrays.5400 RPM CMR is darn-near unusable. I can only imagine the level of suckage produced by 5400 RPM SMR drives. Ugh.
icebox - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
7200 is considered performance for the sime reason that 10k and 15k are being replaced with ssd's.PEJUman - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
I think the 10k and 15k drives are no longer viable, with SSD filling their roles. I for one have abandoned HDDs and gone to full SSD storage. The cost premium for QLC SSD is now lower than the labor and reduced array performance on HDD array rebuilds.Maybe at data centers these HHD still makes sense. But for my use, QLC SSD array works much more reliably and faster at everything an SOHO/SMB duty cycle can throw at it.
Samus - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Seriously, when is the last time you saw a Raptor HDD? I think they capped out at 600GB and even at <$100, you can get an enterprise SSD at that capacity for about that price.sandtitz - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Last time I saw a Raptor was last year when I oversaw destruction of some long ago decommissioned desktop PCs. Raptors were sorta cool back in 2003-2005 (or so) when they debuted, if you discounted the small capacities, high price, high noise and high temps.The talk here is about server grade hard drives, where 10k drives existed long before WD started to sell Raptors for end users.
I'd like to know which 600GB *ENTERPRISE* SSDs you can get for <$100 and what your definition for ENTERPRISE grade is.
Samus - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Raptors were quite common in enterprise up until just a few years ago. The HP Z440 workstations at a client of mine have HP OEM Raptor 600GB drives and they are common in previous generation ThinkStation's as well.Besides, nobody said Raptors were enterprise-grade drives. I simply compared them to something in that realm of reliability by mentioning an MLC-based SSD (which is mostly delegated to enterprise SSD's)
Sandisk CloudSpeed SSD's retail for $129 @ 400GB and $199 @ 600GB. They regularly sell for half that, especially the ECO models (you can pickup 1.92GB ECO's lightly used for <$200)
I really don't know why you were so hostile at unjustly implying ignorance in my post.
haukionkannel - Thursday, June 25, 2020 - link
Stull own two velocity raptor hds... good stuff, but yeah the price vs speed is not part with lowend ssd any more!But both the 150gb and 600gb versions still works like a charm, so They were made well!
sandtitz - Thursday, June 25, 2020 - link
"Raptors were quite common in enterprise up until just a few years ago."Perhaps that's a regional thing since I honestly haven't seen Raptors even in the last decade. HP didn't offer Z440 with Raptors, the last model to have Raptors as an option was the first generation Z (Z400), released in 2009, after which they started to offer SSD's instead when Intel et al. had started to commoditize SSD.
"I really don't know why you were so hostile at unjustly implying ignorance in my post."
Pardon. Perhaps I was in snarky mood but this forum seems to garner a lot of consumers posting about their experiences with consumer gear, prosumer at best. PEJUman wrote about '10k and 15k drives' which implies SAS drives and your Raptor comment was therefore out of scope.
Samus - Friday, June 26, 2020 - link
Sigh. Not sure where you get this data from. I literally work for multinational corporations that have machines from the last few years with OEM VelociRaptors, specifically Z230 (Haswell/2014) on the low-end of the scale and even HP Z1 G2 AIO's (actually newer than the Z440's I previously mentioned) all have 1TB models (WD1000DHTZ) IN AN ALL IN ONE CHASSIS.They are a lot more common than you believe - partially due to traditional IT departments being cautious about constantly evolving SSD technology. That has obviously shifted dramatically in the last 5 or so years as the Z440 and Z1 G2 are the last chassis generations I know of that had them from HP. Lenovo ThinkStations, especially in international markets, had VelociRaptors up until very recently paired with Optane (which was a remarkably good combination for capacity\performance\reliability.) The only reason I believe HP shifted focus away from Raptors in their workstations was to promote their own Z Turbo Drive that by no coincidence launched with the discontinuation of VelociRaptors.
sandtitz - Friday, June 26, 2020 - link
"Sigh. Not sure where you get this data from."Sigh, I get them from HP Quickspecs, which list the factory configurations. I too, work with multinational (intercontinental) corps and with/for system integrator. I've been HP for the last 20 years.
HP had Raptors available as an option, no disagreement there.
"Seriously, when is the last time you saw a Raptor HDD? I think they capped out at 600GB [...]"
"[...]all have 1TB models (WD1000DHTZ) IN AN ALL IN ONE CHASSIS."
Your original statement conflicts greatly with your later reply.
"HP shifted focus away from Raptors in their workstations was to promote their own Z Turbo Drive"
WD introduced the final Raptor generation in 2012 and the SATA SSDs trounced them in all benchmarks, except $/GB - and the SSD's were rapidly getting cheaper. Raptors were obsolete.
I don't think the Z Turbo had anything to do with Raptors' demise since it's in a class of its own and HP still offers 15k SAS drives for workstations if you really need spinning rust.
Samus - Friday, June 26, 2020 - link
Technical type on the 600GB cap. Those were the models most common on CTO's but 1TB drives are in numerous factory configs, and of course available in CTO's.Your last statement conflicts with the fact other OEM's were using Raptors with Optane up until recently. I don't think there was a 'demise' or obsolescence in 2012. HDD's still outship SSD's by a huge margin to this day in office PC's.
sandtitz - Saturday, June 27, 2020 - link
"HDD's still outship SSD's by a huge margin to this day in office PC's."Any references to back this?
The few marketshare statistics I could find claim that SSD's are on par with HDD's in number of units sold, though Office PC's are not specifically mentioned. Laptops have been mostly SSD's for several years now, and the desktop procurements I've been involved with have mostly been SSD's since a base 128GB/256GB unit (for example) is inexpensive and quite enough for most office use. YMMV.
quorm - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Honestly for a small NAS, say 4-6 drives, 5400 rpm drives should easily saturate a gigabit ethernet port (or two).MDD1963 - Friday, July 3, 2020 - link
ServeTheHome's testing of CMR vs. SMR only showed barely a 10x increase in time required for a rebuild, 11 hours for CMR vs. 120 (SMR) or so.... :)icebox - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Why do I have the bad feeling red plus will be more expensive?haukionkannel - Thursday, June 25, 2020 - link
Ofcourse They Are more expensive, They did use that not so good in nas usage version to reduce prices, that is Also why people did buy those. They did have better price/capasity than previous versions.limitedaccess - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
I actually feel tech media did a disservice with the reporting regarding this by only focusing on NAS drives.There should've been pressure on the manufactures to release details on all their drives including external ones.
But because of the NAS focus there was only disclosure regarding NAS drives specifically.
Arbie - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
I agree completely with mmrezaie. Why even have a "NAS Hard Drive" that is inherently a poor choice for most NAS configs? Why wreck the Red branding which formerly (to NAS noobs like me) meant "good for NAS - buy this and you'll be OK"? Now Red means "go figure out if you'd even want this in the system".MrVibrato - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Because consumer/SOHO NAS HDD's, especially those with lower-capacities, have no noteworthy future in the market. The writing is on the wall, consumers will either migrate to cloud or SSD-based storage. Obviously, for HDD vendors prefer if consumers will rather transition to cloud instead to SSDs, because guess what that storage in the cloud data centers is made of...jamies - Tuesday, October 13, 2020 - link
Problem with cloud is that most broadband providers upload speed is vastly lower then the quoted download. for a 100GB image upload that may well take several days - so a USB is a reasonable choice - but... what drive is in the Seagate branded USB case - well you'll find out when you start using the drive and query the OS as to what the hardware is - and it is then that you can check the limits to the warrantee - maybe a whole 2400 hours of use on the shingularly slow drive.Samus - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Sometimes I think Sandisk is running WD's marketing. These are tactics that Sandisk (and to a lesser extent - Kingston) have been exploiting for at least a decade: dramatically changing the internal hardware of a product model without mention.For example: the Sandisk SSD Plus came in 3 versions; 2 different controller configurations and 3 different NAND types (only one of which is MLC) and while the performance metrics are firmware tweaked to meet their 'up to' marketing requirements, the sustained performance and DWPD were all over the place between models. Since they never disclosed sustained performance or DWPD, instead relying on burst performance (which is a bs metric since its limited by SATA in every modern SSD anyway) and MTBF (another bs metric for obvious reasons, a remnant of predicted hard disk "determined reliability")
WD, distance yourself from Sandisk, they're going to sink you.
Gigaplex - Wednesday, June 24, 2020 - link
Are they now going to charge more for these? If they charge more for the WD30EFRX WD Red Plus than I paid for my current WD30EFRX WD Red drives, this is just a money grab.scineram - Thursday, June 25, 2020 - link
I will be expanding my FreeNAS with IronWolfs, thank you. It already has Baracudas from just before they went SMR.abufrejoval - Thursday, June 25, 2020 - link
I have been a happy WD customer for decades.I was also lucky to completely bypass these SMR drives.
What they have committed there is quite simply fraud. HDDs are block addressable devices that will have both the natural block and seek overheads, but otherwise have constant latencies on updates.
SMR are *specific purpose* devices, meant for markets, who understand how they trade in-place update overhead for higher capacity at a given price point.
To let this storage class lose on customers who might put these into ZFS or RAID5/6 appliances and then suffer unexplainable and hard to explain write amplification is quite simply a criminal offense.
Leniency in this case is not only undeserved: Punitive action must be so scary, no bean-counter ever tries to take a similar route.
Because the damage inflicted on affected puchasers of these drives is hundreds of times bigger than the value of these devices.
To think that this is the company that Martin Fink is now working for: The shame must be taking 10 years from his life. Whoever let this happen basically invalidated everything he's done for the company and the life-time work of many more WD engineers, who gave their hearts for a superior product only to be failed by people who probably thought themselves smart.
Very Volkswagen to me and I am a German driving Ford.
zodiacfml - Friday, June 26, 2020 - link
WD deserves more punishment.chaos215bar2 - Friday, June 26, 2020 - link
Yeah, no.Now anyone seeking to "upgrade" an existing WD Red drive, who doesn't research exactly what they're getting (because why would you — WD Red was working just fine) gets stuck with SMR. And what's next? Is WD going to downgrade Gold and make a "Gold Plus"? "Black Plus"?
The only thing this cleans up is the idea that WD's branding is worth anything. I'll be sticking with companies that don't play games with their established and trusted brands to sell inferior technology to customers who don't know the difference, thank-you-very-much. There's absolutely a place for SMR, and the low capacity drives in the long-established and (formerly) trusted WD Red line are most certainly not it.
jamies - Tuesday, October 13, 2020 - link
Following on from my 2 earlier replies -I have managed to get a link to the page detailing the SMR or CMR' ness of the Seagate current (as at whenever) drives. that contains a note to check the current status as the status detailed may change.
From that it seems that for CMR one should buy Ironwolf or BarraCuda-Pro drives rather than barraCuda ones
HOWEVER - there seems to be NO indication as to what drive is in which of the USB cased expansion and 'Backup' storage offerings.
So - which from which companies will you be getting your backup and long-term archive storage.
Anyone know of a good storage facility for a collection of bare 3.5 and 2.5 drives if I go for a USB-3.0 or USB-c connecting slot-the-drive-in caddy for the backups.