schoondoggy Posted April 15, 2020 Share Posted April 15, 2020 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 comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oj88 Posted April 16, 2020 Share Posted April 16, 2020 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 comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
schoondoggy Posted April 16, 2020 Author Share Posted April 16, 2020 Hard to say, it may make sense to go with 8TB drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Al_Borges Posted April 16, 2020 Share Posted April 16, 2020 how do the Seagate nas drives compare? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trig0r Posted April 16, 2020 Share Posted April 16, 2020 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 comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Al_Borges Posted April 16, 2020 Share Posted April 16, 2020 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 comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trig0r Posted April 16, 2020 Share Posted April 16, 2020 "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 comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nrf Posted April 16, 2020 Share Posted April 16, 2020 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 comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oj88 Posted April 16, 2020 Share Posted April 16, 2020 (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, 2020 by oj88 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Al_Borges Posted April 16, 2020 Share Posted April 16, 2020 it looks like they are all doing this https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sneaky-marketing-toshiba-seagate-wd-smr-drives-without-disclosure Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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