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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.
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).
I do like the specs in the Seagate Ironwolf drives. The only problem for me would be that they're 5400-5900 until you get to their 8TB capacity. The last time I attempted to add space to my ReadyNAS, I tried using Ironwolf 2TB, and ReadyNAS wasn't at all happy about it because the existing drives were 7200rpm. That's what prompted me to fall back to the 2TB BarraCuda drives that were secretly running SMR.
Unless I were to rebuild the RAID from scratch, where I'd replace all four drives at once, then restore from backup, I'd be replacing them one at a time. In that situation, the RPM's must match.
To me, any real nas-capable drive will be 7200rpm because they always have been--the first drives that were used in production raids were 7200rpm, then 10000rpm, and today as high as 15000rpm. This is still evident today by the fact that no sas drive can be purchased less than 7200rpm.
The slower rpms were always for consumer drives or other such rubbish that couldn't take the duty cycles. Granted, today these drives can also run cooler, use less power, etc, while keeping very nice data transfer rates...if they aren't smr--which is the new game that is being played to undermine the value of these drives as 7200rpm replacments.
The problem is the division between consumer and professional drives that started decades ago are now merging again. And if the drives aren't really that different, the prices shouldn't be either. Well, the one way to make those prices stay different is to cheapen out the cheap drives again--hence smr. But I think it's a bit futile as ssd costs are dropping fast enough that by the time smr drives are accepted, they'll also be gone.
Mauser69 wrote:I am late to this discussion here, but the topic of customers getting screwed by secret SMR garbage drives really has me ticked off. They only started publishing the truth after they were caught.
Today this is considered 'smart business'. It is exactly what they call it in the third-world as well.
Shady business tactics used to be illegal--whatever happened to that?
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