I don't think this lawsuite is going to succeed, the drive is for better or worse, a hard drive.

Weird. I do not particularly often write data to my NAS. And I do not need it to write fast.

You're missing the point. Whilst SMR drives are fine in a non parity striped array (unRAID), they suffer terribly in one which is (FreeNAS or hardware raid etc). They should be sued. They missold a product that was designed for use as a NAS hard drive, when the underlying technology within it, is ill suited for that task and actually puts your data at risk.

sdamaged99:

You're missing the point. Whilst SMR drives are fine in a non parity striped array (unRAID), they suffer terribly in one which is (FreeNAS or hardware raid etc). They should be sued. They missold a product that was designed for use as a NAS hard drive, when the underlying technology within it, is ill suited for that task and actually puts your data at risk.

There is large quantity of SATA SSDs that can't read/write nowhere near their specifications. When I got myself Patriot Burst 1TB, it could not write consistently more than 40MB/s of game files as I was transferring part of game library from NVMe. Drive simply gave 100% active time to windows and it shown like 900~2500ms response time. Then that thing had read speed mostly between 80~200MB/s before hitting 100% active time as I wanted to test how it moves (reads) data back to NVMe. I could not stand it and it had to go. Who's suing all those SSD manufacturers? I am pretty sure that this particular SSD is at similar level in practical use as HDD in article.

@Fox2232 i think the issue is they where sold for raid purposes and they could not work on a raid array at all getting kicked out of the array etc I do not know about you if i had a pick up track and the truck was ejecting anything i try to load at it ... I would have been pretty pissed about it 😛

Venix:

@Fox2232 i think the issue is they where sold for raid purposes and they could not work on a raid array at all getting kicked out of the array etc I do not know about you if i had a pick up track and the truck was ejecting anything i try to load at it ... I would have been pretty pissed about it 😛

Well, that's different kind of problem. And I do not know if they declared some kind of RAID compatibility or not. (Even while I take ability of each drive to work in RAID as granted automatically today, if they did not directly stated it, they are pretty safe in front of law.) If anything, such thing does PR damage to brand name.

@Fox2232 maybe wanna google stuff before commenting. i make it easy for you: quoting WD Built for NAS Compatibility ".. are purpose-built to balance performance and reliability in NAS and RAID environments." https://shop.westerndigital.com/en-ie/products/internal-drives/wd-red-sata-hdd#WD10EFRX

Astyanax:

I don't think this lawsuite is going to succeed, the drive is for better or worse, a hard drive.

I already had the luck of one drive failing on me and doing a resilver of my RAID 1. The whole process took almost a week for 3 TB of data. SMR drivers are just not meant to be used in these type of work enviroment.

fry178:

@Fox2232 maybe wanna google stuff before commenting. i make it easy for you: quoting WD Built for NAS Compatibility ".. are purpose-built to balance performance and reliability in NAS and RAID environments." https://shop.westerndigital.com/en-ie/products/internal-drives/wd-red-sata-hdd#WD10EFRX

But does it fail a lot? Apparently they claim balance. Performance is not greatest, so what is reliability?

The greater issue was due to the fact that when you buy drives for a RAID array, especially ones for RAID 5 and 6 you want them to be the same physically and the same firmware, I have 8 of these WD RED drives from several years ago in my Server, they are not the SMR type cause they where not in production then, but let's say I go to replace them with the exact same model number that I bought before, I would expect them to be the same, but they have changed them physically and not changed the model number, so I replace several drives and things start going wrong then I would be pretty pissed and also in the situation now where I know I can't replace these drives without replacing all of them. Do these new drives work in RAID 5 or 6 if you just bought only these ones new, I can't say, but I think it is silly for them to sell them as the exact same model number, they should have just sold 2 different variants with different model numbers, with the SMR ones being cheaper and that might have changed things for the better, although putting the SMR into the RED line-up still might have been a bad choice, I think I need to see more data on how good they are when it is purely them in an Array. But I would never mix and match 2 different drives in an Array and that is effectively what they are, a different drive.

mjgr33n:

The greater issue was due to the fact that when you buy drives for a RAID array, especially ones for RAID 5 and 6 you want them to be the same physically and the same firmware, I have 8 of these WD RED drives from several years ago in my Server, they are not the SMR type cause they where not in production then, but let's say I go to replace them with the exact same model number that I bought before, I would expect them to be the same, but they have changed them physically and not changed the model number, so I replace several drives and things start going wrong then I would be pretty pissed and also in the situation now where I know I can't replace these drives without replacing all of them. Do these new drives work in RAID 5 or 6 if you just bought only these ones new, I can't say, but I think it is silly for them to sell them as the exact same model number, they should have just sold 2 different variants with different model numbers, with the SMR ones being cheaper and that might have changed things for the better, although putting the SMR into the RED line-up still might have been a bad choice, I think I need to see more data on how good they are when it is purely them in an Array. But I would never mix and match 2 different drives in an Array and that is effectively what they are, a different drive.

Actually to be fair mine say EFRX and the ones with issue are EFAX, so I would be fine /phew

@Fox2232 doesnt really matter. they advertised as NAS/RAID drives, when they wont work (even if only "properly) as such, so they claim is valid.

https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/SMR-RAIDZ-Rebuild-v2.png That's 10 days !!! https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/ I would be really REALLY pissed if I saw this on my NAS. 100% agree with the lawsuit.

I stopped buying western digital when I paid full price for their 2TB drive green to have it transfer <35kb/sec transfer rate after you fill it 60%+. Could of paid similar price for Seagate and had full speed all the way. Western digital complete trash hard drives.

WD respond most likely "if u need high IO, go with RED Pro or GOLD or ultrastar series" now in their store, they mention SMR and CMR https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-sata-hdd even funny on check-compability : "Desktop drives aren't purpose-built for NAS. But WD Red Pro drives with NASware 3.0 are. Our exclusive technology takes the guesswork out of selecting a drive." well basically like i said above lol now for lawsuit... spec-wise, the SMR drive perform within data-sheet, when it claim it not suitable for NAS that can be case-by-case different such home-nas that used for backup or media station, most likely there no issue with SMR drive, especially for NAS that filled with all SMR drives (not mixed) the only pushing is that new SMR (EFAX) is not perform-same/compatible to old-red CMR (EFRX), as for consumer, many dont look detailed down to those product-code well bet lawyer find many things to claim in the end as long they clearly saying recording-tech, then it should fine

WD infernal client SMR HDDs

I think that WD might be in trouble, based on the serve the home video, it seems that started shipping SMR drives in the red series without telling anyone, they will probably settle out of court though.

I am sad that a "WD Black" has SMR platters. WD has won the race-to-bottom today! :-(

fry178:

@Fox2232 maybe wanna google stuff before commenting. i make it easy for you: quoting WD Built for NAS Compatibility ".. are purpose-built to balance performance and reliability in NAS and RAID environments." https://shop.westerndigital.com/en-ie/products/internal-drives/wd-red-sata-hdd#WD10EFRX

Yes, but that is for the previous EFRX drives which are not SMR. We are talking about the EFAX drives which are SMR. If WD is still promoting those for NAS and RAID environments, they are clearly misleading their customers. --- Edit --- Just looked at the WD Red page you linked and they are not stating anywhere that the SMR drives are unsuited for NAS and RAID applications. The page itself promotes the use of WD Red drives for those purposes and the only indication that these EFAX drives use a different technology is the list at the bottom where they list both the CMR and SMR in separate columns. No word about the fact that these SMR based disks are not suited for NAS and RAID purposes. Very misleading IMHO. And the even more heinous thing is that the EFAX drives of 8TB and higher use CMR again. I'm currently running a four disk NAS (Synology) with WD40ERFX 4 TB drives, I've already had to swap a drive out because of increasing drive errors (seems like a bad track has developed on that drive), so I'm looking for a spare disk. Luckily I noticed the stories about the EFAX editions before I bought my spare, otherwise I could have run into this exact problem if another drive needs to be replaced.

I thought the WD Red 6.0TB drive I have was one of these... but it seems mine is WD60EFRX instead of WD60EFAX. I actually only took it out of machine over weekend before I read this news somewhere else so it is sitting on deck beside me. I was getting pissed because that has been in use for over a year in a very random write heavy application, so I thought that cold have been slower than it should have been. So which of the multiple disc utilities read/write benchmarks is best for comparing difference of these particular drives weakness then?? ps. I knew all that ASMR ear licking was a bad idea 😉 https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ECdDkpQ8YqA/maxresdefault.jpg