Back in April, there was quite a bit of discussion about WD mot mention that a part of their NAS line of HDDs was not RAID compatible due to storage methodology. They're now getting sued about it.
Users had been experiencing problems adding the latest WD Red NAS drives to RAID arrays, they suspected it is because they are actually shingled magnetic recording drives submarined into the channel. Problems surfaced once adding a new WD Red NAS drive to a RAID array. Although it was sold as a RAID drive, the device “keep getting kicked out of RAID arrays due to errors during resilvering,” was reported.
SMR and NAS are not compatible
Shingled media recording (SMR) disk drives take advantage of disk write tracks being wider than read tracks to partially overlap write tracks and so enable more tracks to be written to a disk platter. This means more data can be stored on a shingled disk than an ordinary drive. However, SMR drives are not intended for random write IO use cases because the write performance is much slower than with a non-SMR drive. Therefore they are not recommended for NAS use cases featuring significant WD now has been sued because such disks have been sold as NAS HDDs. Law firm Hattis Law has started the lawsuit.
The affected HDD (hard disk drive) models are:
- 3.5″ WD Red 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, 6TB
(SKUs: WD20EFAX, WD30EFAX, WD40EFAX, WD60EFAX)
- 3.5″ WD Blue 2TB, 6TB
(SKUs: WD20EZAZ, WD60EZAZ)
- 2.5″ WD Blue 1TB, 2TB
(SKUs: WD10SPZX, WD20SPZX)
- 2.5″ WD Black 1TB
(SKU: WD10SPSX)
