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Forum Discussion
shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard drive fiasco - inquiring on recommendations
It's been a while since I jumped on the forum but what brings me here is my NAS volume utilization is hovering around 65%. I believe it's good until 80% and then starts to bark at you about storage ...
So timing is everything, when did you buy your WD100EFAX? From what I read, they started inserting SMR drives into the red NAS line around early 2017. Therefore, it's possible you didn't get a drive using SMR depending on when you purchased it. The WD101EFAX also seems to be the replacement for it but both can still be purchased off Amazon with the WD101EFAX being about $10 more. I was also under the impression you can run read/write programs such as CrystalDiskMark to determine if the drive can write 100+MB/s. Most seem to agree that the SMR drives fall off to around 30MB/s which is the give away. I suppose droping a 30GB file onto the drive would accomplished similar results. I seen some who mentioned the ONLY way to determine is to call WD support and provide them a serial #. I could always order the drives and upon receipt call them to verify. Alternatively and if I trust WD to be honest I could just spend an extra $50-$60 per drive and get the pro version which are supposedly all CMR but then again why overpay if it's not necessary. The other method of verification I saw was to open/destroy the drive and count platters but who has money to burn and even then it's no gurantee the next one will be the same. Anyhow, rant over but was I was hoping for a simple black/white yes/no answer but alas it's a gamble either way.
NASguru wrote:
So timing is everything, when did you buy your WD100EFAX?
April/May 2019
NASguru wrote:
I was also under the impression you can run read/write programs such as CrystalDiskMark to determine if the drive can write 100+MB/s.
Not 100% sure on that. Sequential writes from beginning to the end of the disk could run at near-normal speed. And with soft sector mapping there are a lot of tricks you could play in theory, especially if part of the drive is CMR.
In any event, I did run a full erase on both drives before I added them to the NAS. While I didn't closely monitor the times, I believe it was approximately 24 hours for each (which is ~115 MB/s for 10 TB).
I also have the resilver time in an old log zip.
data resilver 2019-04-28 09:54:41 2019-04-29 17:46:39 completed
This resilvered the first inserted WD100EFAX, and completed in ~32 hours. 6 TB on the WD100EFAX would have been written, and 18 TB of data would have been read on the other three drives (all WD60EFRX). Plus the NAS was in use during the resync.
I haven't noticed any slowdown in performance on sustained writes since they were installed.
NASguru wrote:
if I trust WD to be honest
Seagate is known to have silently slipped SMR into some desktop drives. Though they don't recommend those disks for RAID, I still think that's a breach of trust.
Of course WD has now confessed that they did silently slip SMR into the 2-6 TB Red Drives. But in that confession they explicitly stated that larger Red drives (8 TB and up) used CMR. It's one thing for a company to be silent. It's another to make a false statement.
Personally I'd take WD at their word on the currently shipping drives. Honestly I don't know if I trust them to disclose SMR in new drives they introduce in the future. Their disclosure didn't include an apology or any promise of transparency in the future - instead they just asserted that their SMR Reds are fit for their purpose - which is quite debatable.
Hopefully there will be a lesson learned here for both Seagate and WD. I'll be looking for explicit statements on SMR, CMR (or HAMR) on future models I purchase.
I ran across this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWYnM58C1ro
Might be worth following, as he is planning some testing of these drives in RAID.
I saw someone mention weighing them to see if it has fewer platters. I don't know about that, the platters are pretty light. But that means you have to buy it first, too.
Sandshark wrote:
I saw someone mention weighing them to see if it has fewer platters. I don't know about that, the platters are pretty light. But that means you have to buy it first, too.
Yeah, I don't think I'd trust a weight comparison. There could be other component differences between the models, or even the case.
WD did respond with a list of specific models that used SMR and said that all other models did not. Personally I'd just go with that.
It'll be interesting to see the performance numbers for RAID resync when the youtube guy above presents his testing results. Also, if other folks here have the EFAX models above, it'd be helpful to hear your experiences.
The negative impact of SMR does depend on the details of how well WD manages the cache, and how many SMR zones are on the disks (also the capacity of CMR zones on the disk). No matter how you do it, write performance will sometimes be "unpredictable". But if they found a way to handle RAID resync and reshaping in a reasonable time, it might be acceptable for a light-duty NAS. Personally I'll stick with CMR though.
I did run across a 2018 WD whitepaper on this btw - https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/collateral/white-paper/white-paper-shingled-magnetic-recording-helioseal-technology.pdf
StephenB wrote:I ran across this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWYnM58C1ro
Might be worth following, as he is planning some testing of these drives in RAID.
Got it, although his current video is a rehash of everything I've seen already.
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