schoondoggy 878 Posted April 15 Share Posted April 15 The article does not mention if these are retail drives purchased from an authorized source or shucked USB externals: https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-magnetic-recording/?fbclid=IwAR3hwSLG89Bt7v5OWeAYw7T6ZjDHb_noDP1J-qsrLyu9BZrSjmyz1EizyQs Link to post Share on other sites
oj88 131 Posted April 16 Share Posted April 16 Oh no! WD Red drives had been my go-to drives for my homeserver since they started making them. So, is it correct to assume that I should avoid WDx0EFAX drives between 2TB to 6TB, unless they're the older WDx0EFRX variety? All my current 3TB and 4TB Reds are WDx0EFRX. The older batches of these drives have been spinning for over 7 years. Link to post Share on other sites
schoondoggy 878 Posted April 16 Author Share Posted April 16 Hard to say, it may make sense to go with 8TB drives. Link to post Share on other sites
Al_Borges 88 Posted April 16 Share Posted April 16 how do the Seagate nas drives compare? Link to post Share on other sites
Trig0r 210 Posted April 16 Share Posted April 16 Ok for NAS but not for RAID, perhaps they are trying to make a product difference between the NAS and Gold/Enterprise drives? Link to post Share on other sites
Al_Borges 88 Posted April 16 Share Posted April 16 Don't recognize the original site, but Tom's Hardware corroborates the storyhttps://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-fesses-up-some-red-hdds-use-slow-smr-tech Link to post Share on other sites
Trig0r 210 Posted April 16 Share Posted April 16 "All our WD Red drives are designed meet or exceed the performance requirements and specifications for common small business/home NAS workloads. We work closely with major NAS providers to ensure WD Red HDDs (and SSDs) at all capacities have broad compatibility with host systems. Currently, Western Digital’s WD Red 2TB-6TB drives are device-managed SMR (DMSMR). WD Red 8TB-14TB are CMR-based." Thats the important bit, so 8tb> are good still... Link to post Share on other sites
nrf 135 Posted April 16 Share Posted April 16 14 hours ago, oj88 said: So, is it correct to assume that I should avoid WDx0EFAX drives between 2TB to 6TB, unless they're the older WDx0EFRX variety? All my current 3TB and 4TB Reds are WDx0EFRX. The older batches of these drives have been spinning for over 7 years. can you provide some reference for this distinction? Link to post Share on other sites
oj88 131 Posted April 16 Share Posted April 16 (edited) 7 hours ago, nrf said: can you provide some reference for this distinction? It's written in black and white and my takeaway from the article. It's quite shady of WD not to disclose this fact. Why does it matter? Well, Synology for one, doesn't recommend mixing PMR and SMR drives. Imagine a scenario that you already have a bunch of WD Red drives for at least a couple of years and then decided to increase your storage capacity. You then pick up a new WD Red drive and add it to the pool, thinking that it should be a walk in the park.... voila! Problems. That's exactly what happened to this poor chap: https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/1/post/127228 Synology also has this to say: https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/PMR_SMR_hard_disk_drives Quote We recommend establishing a RAID on either all PMR drives or all SMR drives. If a RAID is established on both PMR and SMR drives, the overall read/write performance may be affected by the SMR ones during overwriting tasks. - Edited April 16 by oj88 1 Link to post Share on other sites
Al_Borges 88 Posted April 16 Share Posted April 16 it looks like they are all doing this https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sneaky-marketing-toshiba-seagate-wd-smr-drives-without-disclosure Link to post Share on other sites
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