Would strongly suggest reading through the source and some of the links provided there, the smartmontools ticket is especially, well, sad, I guess.
This old reddit post has a good analogy for how SMR works. As a result this technology was mostly used for archive drives, where random writes (and especially overwrites) are not a concern.
Depending on your use-case this might, or might not, be relevant to you. Then again, archive drives are generally cheaper than NAS drives, so WD selling what are basically cheaper drives for a premium should be relevant to most customers, even though the performance impact might not be.
In any case, being aware that this is even a thing, and being able to judge for yourself, and avoid these drives in case it is an issue for your use-case, is rather important, imho.
My understanding is that Seagate is a lot more open about ti (yeah, upon further reading turns out to not really be the case) and includes this fact in their specs (at least nowadays), while WD tried to swipe it under the rug.
“Home NAS” usage, which often is more of an “archival” type of workload. The fact that many of these would be better served by a different type of drive, of course, doesn’t change the fact that selling NAS drives that have trouble with actual NAS workloads is questionable, at best…
Some more details by the person that initially quizzed WD about the issue.
Glad I ended up with a Seagate (which I since verified is not a SMR drive) due to availability. Next drives will likely avoid both brands since they can’t be relied on to provide products that match what’s on the tin.
For SMR without the buyer’s awareness there should be a death penalty…
I recommend buying such a disk for testing, only then you can feel the pain fully.
The point is that they have non informative specs. So now you have to check every single model number that it is not shingled.
So the 8tb and above models of the NAS drives are unaffected, but that is only for the current models. So if they do a minor revision, they might slip in shingling. Also, there are other 8tb+ drive types that are shingled.
Just heard about it on the PCPer podcast. It’s a really shitty move from every company involved but it is a reason to boycott WD for years for me. I mean, sure, you’re always supposed to have a backup but letting people buy SMR drives as RED and therefor NAS drives and potentially killing their arrays is mind meltingly stupid.
At least until this came out then it is really stupid but, don’t care, made money, and people always need drives so they are not really In danger of losing too many sales especially seeing as everyone is doing it and therefore no reason to implicitly trust any other over them.
Why would I buy a drive from the same company I just lost a bunch of data over? Most people would look at other vendors first because they had a bad experience.
