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WD Red Hard Disks: CMR vs SMR
Dear Forum Members, especially StephenB It's been a time since I've visited the hallowed pages of this forum and, as expected, time as moved on and new HD technologies have been introduced. I...
ukbobboy01 wrote:
PS. Is it true that there's a consumer class action against WD for the way they introduced SMR into the HD market?
Yes (in the US and Canada).
ukbobboy01 wrote:
For myself, I'm worried about compatibility issues, e.g. will these SMR drives work with my current CMR ones or even work with my old ReadyNAS's OS (probably not).
I think the system will accept them, but that the performance will be worse than with CMR drives. How much worse is hard to say. You can read through the arstechnical tests earlier, they are probably closer to what you'll see in legacy ReadyNAS than the servethehome tests.
One option would be to go with jbod (one volume per disk), and not use RAID.
Here is one set of tests with the ZFS file system:
To be fair, there are some other testers that didn't see such poor results, but they still found that the WD Red SMR drives didn't perform as well as CMR drives.
IMO, SMR is not a good option for ReadyNAS OS-6 systems using RAID. Some users here have seen excessive resync times with them. I've avoided them (and purchased WD Red Plus drives recently, which are CMR).
Replacing a single 6TB CMR Red drive with an SMR (before WD's sneaky substitution became common knowledge) in a 6-drive RAID5 more than tripled the time it took my ReadyNAS to perform a scrub and totally locked up everything else while it was happening. Had I not gone to SSH and canceled the scrub, allowed other stacked up processes to complete, and then resumed the scrub, it may never have completed.
Replacing that drive with an 8TB (still CMR) Red eliminated the problem, confirming it was the SMR drive that caused the issue.
My conclusion is that SMR drives have no business in any RAID system and WD should be taken to court for selling those pieces of junk as acceptable for that use.
Sandshark wrote:
WD should be taken to court for selling those pieces of junk as acceptable for that use.
They have been. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-class-action-lawsuit-smr-hard-drive-us-canada
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