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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 ...
Servethehome just did a nice article on the SMR drives in a RAID:
https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/
They also have a table of SMR drives:
WD has a class action lawsuit filed against them:
I've always only purchased enterprise class 5yr warranty drives, even for desktop use. If you look properly you can find them at great prices too, so you can get a really good price/performance ratio without having to deal with 1M MTBF drives with lesser warranties as well as shenanigans.
SamirD wrote:
Servethehome just did a nice article on the SMR drives in a RAID:
https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/
Yeah, I caught their youtube video on it: https://youtu.be/8hdJTwaTl8I Though they tested only with ZFS, I think their results apply to btrfs (and FWIW, to ext).
If you do want to use these drives (personally I wouldn't), then you need to be careful to not store files on the NAS while it is rebuilding or resyncing. That combination is what creates the huge performance hit in write speeds.
SamirD wrote:
They also have a table of SMR drives:
That table actually comes from WD, and is available in many other places. Seagate also has put SMR into many of their desktop (and USB) drives. One implication is that you should be very careful about using desktop drives in a RAID array (and also very careful on USB drive shucking).
I remember when drives where more expensive and were made as robust as possible so there was no 'consumer' drive variant. The reason these problems even exist is because the demand has been trying to put a consumer drive in what is otherwise an enterprise role (storage array).
Even the wd red nas drives that every datahoarder falls all over is nothing when compared to the reliability of a true enterprise drive that has design specifications calling for twice the MTBF and even carrying almost twice the warranty. Yes, it costs nearly twice as much, but then you get what you pay for--consumer drives for cheaper in an enterprise application will have higher failure rates and other issues and that's the cost tradeoff.
There was another article done by servethehome on the whole 'shucking' idea that the consumer drive inside was essentially one of the touted 'red' nas drives:
https://www.servethehome.com/wd-wd100emaz-easystore-10tb-external-backup-drive-review/
And while many similarities between the drives were found, people's real-world experiences in the comments showed the true nature of these drives:
While it's never a good idea to decieve your customers, it's also never a good idea as a consumer to try to decieve a company. I'm sure WD has warranteed many shucked drives that otherwise wouldn't have failed in their original intended use. The street goes both ways.
SamirD wrote:
Even the wd red nas drives that every datahoarder falls all over is nothing when compared to the reliability of a true enterprise drive that has design specifications calling for twice the MTBF and even carrying almost twice the warranty.
I have no issues with people buying enterprise class drives, but I do want to point out that many people don't believe they are worth the extra cost if you are simply looking for more reliability.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/enterprise-drive-reliability/ is an old post arguing that they are not. However, as the market and technology evolve, that could easily change.
SamirD wrote:
it's also never a good idea as a consumer to try to deceive a company. I'm sure WD has warranteed many shucked drives that otherwise wouldn't have failed in their original intended use.
My understanding is that WD can identify the shucked drive by it's serial number (it also is usually labeled differently). So getting it replaced under warranty would require putting it back into the USB shell in a way that doesn't betray the shucking.
That said, I agree with your principle here.
Late to the table with this discussion, but here goes:
In October 2019, I replaced the 1TB Toshiba drives in my ReadyNAS with Seagate BarraCuda 2TB drives, model ST2000DM008. This model is listed on the ReadyNAS compatibility list.Recently, when replacing a drive in another device, I stumbled on the information about SMR vs. CMR technology. This prompted me to go back and check on the specs for the drives that I'd installed in the ReadyNAS. Indeed, this particular model (ST2000DM008) is listed on Seagate's specs page as using SMR recording. However, in their revisions sheet, this wasn't added until May 2020.
I'd be curious to know if this Seagate model was always SMR, and they only fessed up to it in May 2020 by revising the spec sheet and documentation, or if earlier instances of these drives (from October 2019 in my case) used CMR.
Anyone?
I bet if you called Seagate and said you had 2x of these drives, one several years older and the new one is taking longer to rebuild a party drive or some other fake plausable scenario, you could trick them into revealing that the older drive was either cmr or smr.
I am late to this discussion here, but the topic of customers getting screwed by secret SMR garbage drives really has me ticked off. I used to be a big fan of WD drives, but after they started lying to their customers about this stuff, I would not buy another of their WD-branded pieces of junk even at half price. SMR drives are a HUGE problem in some applications, so being able to know for sure which drives are junk is kinda important! One thing I have read is that disgustingly long sequential write speed is an indication of SMR junk.
I do not know the right answer for all drives, but at least for my NAS, I am now only using Seagate IronWolf drives. Seagate has publicly stated that none of the IronWolf series of drives will ever be SMR, so I am trusting that statement when buying drives for NAS and DVR use.
I doubt that I will ever trust buying a WD branded drive again - they have had their chance, and they proved that they were cheats and liers on this subject. They only started publishing the truth after they were caught.
Well, I think that none of the major vendors have been forthcoming (until recently) about their SMR drives. According to Seagate, the BarraCuda 2TB drives, four of which are running in my ReadyNAS, have always been SMR. They only acknowledged it with a spec sheet update last April.
Here are some useful links provided by Bombich Software (Carbon Copy Cloner for Mac) from the major drive vendors indicating which of their product lines use SMR vs. CMR. Apparently, SMR drives don't (among many other issues) play well with Apple's newer drive layout (APFS).
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