The biggest problem with this is not that WD has decided to start using SMR technology on their WD Red drives, but the fact that they haven't warned him anywhere, not even on the disc spec sheet. It would be the equivalent of buying a high performance SSD and finding yourself using cheap NAND QLC chips.
WD admits that their WD Network uses SMR technology
Why is this important? SMR technology is relatively new, and is used to power increase storage density on hard drive platters compared to those using conventional magnetic recording (CMR), but the downside to using it is that these hard drives perform significantly lower in certain workloads.
Likewise, some users have reported problems when trying to rebuild disk RAID systems, which means that users who have a RAID of WD Red drives could be exposed to data loss. Similarly, some have also complained that their systems did not allow them to add WD Red drives to existing RAID systems.
Following these issues, the source contacted Western Digital to inquire why, and the manufacturer provided the following statement:
“All of our WD Red drives are designed to meet or exceed the performance requirements and specifications for common home and small business NAS workloads. We work closely with leading NAS vendors to ensure that hard drives have broad compatibility in all their capabilities. Currently, WD Red 2-6TB drives are Device Managed SMRs (DMSMR), while 8-14TB drives use CMRs. ”
What problems does this bring?
A quick glance at the specification sheet for these hard drives confirms that there is a marked decrease in performance between 2-6TB models operating at 150MB / s and 8-14TB models operating at 210MB / s, And this speaking of theoretical data since you already know that later the real performance data are usually lower.
Part of the blame for this lower performance is because lower capacity drives use fewer chainrings, but SMR technology probably has something to do with this as well, as this technology is characterized by very, very poor performance when random read operations are done, and this is something that WD does not disclose on its spec sheet.
Aside from performance, and as we have already mentioned before with user tests, this type of recording technology gives problems with some RAID systems, and users can find ourselves in the position that we cannot restore a corrupt RAID, or that It even lets us integrate the disk into an existing RAID.
Why has WD not released this information?
Already in itself it is serious that the manufacturer has not specified that these hard drives use SMR technology in the specification sheet, because as soon as a user knows it, they could have decided not to buy these hard drives if they had known. But it is also that this technology allows the manufacturer to save a lot on production costs, but even so this has not been reflected in the price of the discs.
In other words, WD is selling the discs at the same price and without notice of the change, so they are making more money and users get a worse product.
