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WD Sets the Record Straight: Lists All Drives That Use Slower SMR Tech (tomshardware.com) 24
Today the company updated its blog with a more conciliatory tone, and also disclosed all of its drive models that are shipping with SMR tech. In addition to the WD Red NAS drives that the company previously admitted used SMR tech, WD is also shipping the tech into its 2.5″and 3.5″ WD Blue and 2.5″ WD Black lineups. Both models are designed for desktop PCs and laptops, with the former coming as a value drive while the latter is designed for high-performance users. WD acknowledged the recent brouhaha surrounding the fact it was shipping drives without disclosing they use the slower recording technology, stating: “The past week has been eventful, to say the least. As a team, it was important that we listened carefully and understood your feedback about our WD Red NAS drives, specifically how we communicated which recording technologies are used. Your concerns were heard loud and clear…” Importantly, the blog states, “…Thank you for letting us know how we can do better. We will update our marketing materials, as well as provide more information about SMR technology, including benchmarks and ideal use cases.” WD also said that they will share further data in the future, including benchmarks that might prove otherwise.
I got lucky it looks like, Red models up to 6TB are SMR, I ordered a WD Red at the end of last year that was an 8TB and that is still CMR.
It looks like no model over 6TB shipped with SMR.
It’s strange that the lower capacity drives are the ones with SMR. I would think that SMR would be more useful in higher capacity drives, I don’t think it’s difficult to make a 6TB CMR drive, especially since older RED models of those capacities were CMR.
- The speculation that I personally find most likely: they want to cut the platter/ head count, for the sake of profit margins.
>”they want to cut the platter/ head count, for the sake of profit margins.”
Or for the sake of lowering prices as to undercut their competition. If all they wanted was more profit, they could just raise the price to $600 per drive and see how that works out…
- Now that WD has to be public, the sales of the SMR drives will relatively plummet. Within a year I predict WD will cease selling drives with the technology.
I am pretty sure that people will still buy the SMR drives. The technology is not useless and in some cases it’s OK. If you only use the drive for storing movies (not many writes and most writes are sequential) you can save some money buy buying a SMR drive.
As long as WD and others do not lie about the technology, people can make informed decisions and buy the products that suit them.
SMR has its place, but we *need* to know about it.
Luckily this fiasco is unlikely to have affected the most critically affected users such as hardware RAID etc. since it only applies to small drives.Well some people do build arrays out of small drives if they do not need a lot of space, but would like the reliability of RAID.
Hopefully all manufacturers will explicitly specify whether a drive is CMR or SMR in the datasheet.
- I somehow doubt it. History has shown time and time again the most customers will gladly accept an inferior product as long as it’s cheaper. Most people don’t have any understanding of the basic technical specifications for computer hardware, so this is completely out of their wheelhouse. A lot of people don’t even look beyond the price. Also, any of the companies that sell consumer desktops or laptops are always looking for ways to shave a few dollars off their costs.
And most of those people will probably be OK with an SMR drive.
Maybe not.
Maybe they will just increase the non-SMR “cache” area to the point that it hardly matters for almost all users.
Think about it. If you can use 10-20% of the drive as a non-SMR “cache” and use the rest as SMR, only certain high-duty-cycle random-write use cases will be impacted.
If anything pushes SMR out of the home/small-office space, it will be solid-state storage and cloud storage, not this controversy.
Think about it. If you can use 10-20% of the drive as a non-SMR “cache” and use the rest as SMR, only certain high-duty-cycle random-write use cases will be impacted.
Like rebuilding a zfs pool or a hardware RAID array.
They don’t “have” to be public. They’re saying they are. A few years from now they could go back to their old ways, assuming there’s any reason for them to do so at the time.
- by mark_reh ( 2015546 ) on Friday April 24, 2020 @04:33PM (#59986218) Journal
or giving a little more leg room because they “care about their customers’ comfort”. If they cared so much, why did they make the seats so narrow and leg room so short in the first place?
Now WD says “we heard you” but did they ever ask about it before they switched the HDD technology? Someone had to dig into it to figure out what they did and they got caught so now they suddenly care about what their customers think.
At least they came clean. If it encourages Seagate and Toshiba to do the same then its better for buyers everywhere.
In related news … (Score:4, Informative)
by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Friday April 24, 2020 @04:40PM (#59986248)WD will ship very large “Scriptorium” drives that use MR (Monk Recording) technology to archive your data on parchment. Pricing and read/write performance data are currently unavailable.- The benchmarks are still running. Some of the heads are getting rather hungry; one of them has quit altogether, but they are replaceable.
- Not sure if I should laugh or be horrified that my post has been initially mod’ed “Informative”.
- If they were using RLL, I would be concerned. I haven’t seen a 5.25″ full-sized hard drive in decades.
It’s unacceptable for WD Blue drives, so why is it even on WD Black drives?
From the consumer standpoint, I mean. Aside from the theoretical cost advantage, which the consumer probably doesn’t actually see… is there anything SMR does better?
SMR fits more bits into the same area, that’s its entire purpose. Just like MLC, TLC and QLC SSDs.
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