Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording

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Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording

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I had seen something about this a while ago. Older drives are EFRX and the newer ones EFAX. As for SMR and PMR and what's best practice vs marketing depts. integrity ... I'm no expert on this. It's worrying that WD would not engage it a technical discussion and tried to fob off with a general use case: IME, all use cases are specific once they are deployed.
 
Older drives are EFRX and the newer ones EFAX.
Yes, there’s something about it here. On the dark side forum apparently.
From the article:
There is a similar problem mentioned on a Synology Forum where a user added 6TB WD Red [WD60EFAX] drive to a RAID setup using three WD Red 6TB drives [WD60EFRX] in SHR1 mode. He added a fourth drive to convert to SHR2 but conversion took two days and did not complete.
 
we have defined physical boundaries of 3.5” HDD standard, include max. number of magnetic plates, heads, ... in such small environment
and on the other side of the formula is dramatic year to year data spending (demand) growth

it looks like the magic of infinite HDD capacity growth is on edge
especially when speed of light is expected also
 
Currently, Western Digital’s WD Red 2TB-6TB drives are device-managed SMR (DMSMR).
...
In a typical small business/home NAS environment, workloads tend to be bursty in nature ...
Blah, blah, blah...

If you're the "little guy" WD is unconcerned with your little NAS.
 
for all:
- SMR isn’t problem of these days. Real and confirmed concerning about such kind of technology has been known from late 2014 when Seagate created such technology for low cost HDD segment.
- there was main problem - lack of performance consistency
- Seagate Barracuda is entry level disk range and I will never use such disk for my valuable data in NAS. When Seagate "forgot" show this info about SMR it's a shame. But Barracuda segmentation is for "price first" buyer, then no one from such segment care about performance tests.
- as we can see WD with Red range crossed this line of "perfomance+endurance first" w/o any awareness (it is similar to cheaters action from diesel scandal)
- Seagate Exos 5E8 range (enterprise clas) has SMR described in official data sheet from Seagate
and when you will read carefully, there is a statement - Exos 5E8 hard drives are not intended for surveillance or NAS applications, and you may experience lower performance in these environments. ... Best for Low random-write workloads. .....
- do you remember for my post from last year? Seems to be HAMR technology is just one way (real and in near time available) how to produce 3.5” big TBs disk to future. Patented by Seagate.
- yes, there is also technology called BPMR - Bit Patterned Magnetic Recording, but we will wait many years for such first HDD in e-shops.


Conclusion:
- SMR has been developed for low cost segment driven by one and only metric - cost per TB
- as we can see many of big cloud providers (Dropbox) moved their disk capacity to SMR - because the price!
- as was many times recommended from me here, use pencil and paper before you purchase something, otherwise you will get troubles

----

@Shadow
re SMR and Seagate IronWolf range
1. IronWolf range - SMR is not mentioned in official data sheet from Seagate, because they use CMR technology, what is OK for you
 
for all:
- SMR isn’t problem of these days. Real and confirmed concerning about such kind of technology has been known from late 2014 when Seagate created such technology for low cost HDD segment.

..except when used for RAID and arrays break and that's the critical flaw exposed by implementing SMR...I'd call that a pretty glaring problem.
 
either way, not good. the PRO line drew my interest when it came out, but my needs of a NAS are more about minimized failure, stability, and drive longevity. Maybe in the longer term that brand might do better, who knows?
 
there is maybe a time to open a consideration about “go back” to 8” form factor for HDDs
question is how air turbulence, big platters, and speed over 7k rpm in such large environment vs 3.5” will make impact for a lifespan.
I am not worried about who would buy new disk arrays with such new form factor, incompatible with 100% existing arrays?
... just remember for Steve Balmer and his speech about firs iphone
 
...and three people will contact customer care, get a replacement disk, and WD will continue their march forward.

Hey... Remember Intel's chip debacle with nefarious names like "Meltdown"... and yet, Intel has made no fundamental change to its chip architecture other than to add some overhead processes that "mitigate" their faulty design... that's "mitigate", mind you... not "fully resolve"... all at the expense of CPU power.

Will WD change their ways... It's far more likely they will let this SMR buzz fester until SSDs dominate the storage world, and HDDs join floppys in the AOL dustbins. You heard here first, folks!
 
@Telos
it will take a very long time when some technology will replace magnetic recording (HDD) in a backup, cloud and virtualization area. Also number of possible write cycles to single cell is still a show stopper for SSD. You need always take into consideration a tiering of the data usage. Ofc with 2bay NAS there isn’t a discussion about the tiering.
What is more trendy is replacement of SSD SATA3 by NVMe in consumer area (desktop, laptops).
 

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