The most infuriating part of that submarining of SMR into RED line is that they pushed it onto older models that never had this option before, so replacing failed drives in older RAID arrays is dangerous.

This is why I ALWAYS, I mean ALWAYS specify the exact model number on a procurement request for a part that could potentially have multiple variants. The new SMR drives have a different model number. But yeah WD was an utter scumbag for sneaking SMR into the Red series. Also the 1TB 2.5" Black has SMR, seriously, WTF? And to top it off, someone asked one of the manufacturers about a specific drive, at first they replied that they did not know and need to escalate (LOL, the amount of corporate BS), and then after they "escalated the issue" they had the gall to tell the guy that they will not disclose anything about the recording technology of a given drive model. I am not sure if this was WD or not, but whoever it was, they can shove an SMR drive where the sun doesnt shine. And I mean a 3,5" model.

Patrick, thanks for bringing in the perspective of countries outside the US.

Well. I can say that non disclosing on purpose because you know it's not going to sell = lying.

You described me and my issues exactly here. I bought two WD Red drives last year because I thought they were the best and most reliable drives to use in a RAID1 to protect my most important data. I couldn't afford anything above two 2TB drives. My RAID array kept failing and re-building until the drives died and I lost tons of important data going back 20+ years! I was so mad because I thought i'd made all the right decisions. Thankfully, I was able to recover most of my lost data, but I had to pay a lot to do so. Until I found your videos here, I thought I was the only one dealing with this!

It really is about communication and trust. Many NAS customers might only have a fault tolerance of 1 drive in their setup, so knowing which particular model is a suitable replacement for a failed one is crucial. When WD first released some information about which drives had SMR technology they only indicated capacity, not SKUs. Not knowing the SKUs or which year they switched to SMR made it impossible for me to evaluate if I had SMR or CMR drives.

SMR on blue, Yea perfectly fine, I approve of it being used like that SMR on black or unlabled Reds... hellllll to the no. why would you ever do that.

This drives me mad.

This should be a legal reqirement like with what's in our food.... This borders on fraud!? At least there should be a label for those drives What about unraid and such OSs? Can someone use those drives as parity drives?

I was planning on building a NAS box for my home, from march but it was delayed, this was something i never considered. Thanks for the info

Well said. Thank you for putting light on the issue.

It should be mentioned that, incidentally, the capacities of those SMR WD Red drives are what most users buy.

I've been trying to follow this situation since I heard the first rumblings of it. I came here to get a clear, concise rundown of a professional take on this situation and that's exactly what I got! Thanks for helping techies like me stay in-the-loop :)

If manufacturers just list the type of platters used just like the type of NAND used in SSD's, this is not a problem. But I need to know what I'm buying up front. If there's a big enough price difference, I might actually go for SMR and design my storage solution around it.

Thanks for calling them out on this. I hope more news sites do the same.

Such a well thought out and informed video. Completely agree with your thoughts.

great video and great coverage of an important issue. I will be sharing this video a lot, as it tells the story of why and is a great information piece. More videos like this would be great, a video about current events and important news, something you only normally get as an editorial piece on a tech news site. Thanks and keep creating great content :)

This is the video I was looking for, thanks a lot!

Great job on this video! And yes purchase power changes all the dynamics of a products reach.

In the WD case the issue goes beyond not labeling the drives as CMR or SMR. By labeling the SMR drives as Red NAS drives they are purposely marketing them for a use they are not suited for. Their response is even worse because it tries to gas light people into believing that the issue is people purchasing drives for purposes they weren't intended for while at the same time marketing them for just such purposes.

this explains why it takes me 10 minutes to shut down a vm after it's been up for a day. they do fast burst writes, but slow bulk writes (because the cache is saturated). switching to an ssd changes this shutdown time from 10 mins to a few seconds. it used to take about a minute when i used older hard drives.

Well stated and simple and direct message on SMR drives both for consumers and manufacturers.

WD Red's have been my goto drive for a while now, where to go next...

This is your first video that I watch and I already love you.

I like the thought of government regulation as what WD and the other are doing right now amounts to false marketing/selling snake oil.

Thank you STH. I appreciate this video so much. As thoughts of beginning a SOHO business, recently having to learn about all of this just makes me feel discouraged. It's a little sad and upsetting that WD would do this to budget drives that SOHO businesses may only be able to purchase. Having learnt about the market that they are trying to squeeze out profit is not even a big portion of their overall market which just seems really confusing in my opinion. Inconclusion, I agree with you totally that this is not even hurting the big purchasers in the industry, it is only affecting the SOHO businesses.

consider here in italy. I pay on the distribution channel for an 4T ERFX drive about 110 Euros. This price is stable (excluding change fluctuations) for at least two years, so well before inception of smr tech on wd red line. Sum to this the general unavailabity of the drives. I own a small data center and last december i ordered a 12-bay NAS with 4TEFRX. I waited about 1 month to get the drive from a WD multinational (euro-level) primary distributor. I got the RED and not hte RED PRO because i don't need the speed (7200RPM vs. 5400RPM) because i intend to use that nas primarly for backup storage in the DC, and used the $$$ fo fill the nas bays (12 drives) instead of buying only 8. Moreover i really wished to expand my backup policies by buying more space, BUT the situaion here is that going up in the drive capacity DOES NOT SCALE ECONOMICALLY. if i need X euro per GB using 4TB drives, i more than proportionally need Y euro to buy more large drives, so contrarly to the normal wisdom that says tha the more you go up the more the cost per GB goes down, actually, if we think of the drives alone, the cost per GB on drives more than 4T acutally goes way up. I tried to factor in the actual drive bays used, energy savings, datacenter space to reach a comprehensive TCO per GB, but the TCO go UP with more capacity drives. So no, I am forced to remain on the slow EFRX drives because all other options for me have an higher price tag. To sum up: I cannot afford (and even if i could, i cannot justify) to pay more than double for double capacity. Actually for what i see the ratio capacity versus cost is about 2 in capacity to 2,7 in cost. No. WD, no, this is not good. ALL On the lower end red drives. Don't say anything about higher end drives where the factor go up more rapidly. that said, all other comments you did apply. and to not disclose the technology and basically saing in the posts something like is simply INSANE and a breach of TRUST with the vendor as you said very well in the video.

This is super helpful. Thank you

very educative and I appreciate the last art. Good job on this video. Decided to subscribe :-)

Excellent editorial.****

I was waiting on your input on this subject. :)

Phew, i missed the bullet there, since i been using seagate nas drives exclusively.

This is an extremely good presentation on a subject that needs more exposure. I could not agree more with your sentiments or your recommendation. I'm constantly recommending hardware purchases to SME's and WD HD's will not be going onto any of my specifications or recommendations. Like you I need to be able to trust the manufacturers I recommend and I never recommend those I cannot trust. Someone needs to remind the Exec's at WD, Seagate and Toshiba that honesty really is the best policy.

Just not sure why wd thought they could get away with it (well technically they did get away with it for over a year) I could understand it on the blue line of hdds or external hdds, but in a NAS hdd smr is very unsuitable

I can tell you with confidence SMR drives have super slow write speed and must not use in RAID arrays. They can fail during rebulid

Corporations should be punished when they're shady or intransparent with their products!

Very useful. Thanks!

It's bait and switch. Especially for those items that had non-SMR versions before. Loss of performance / features / etc in most countries invites (or should) at least some regulatory investigation, if done at a big enough scale, and you can't really go to a bigger scale than this.

this is not that recent, it's been happening for more than a year now. Glad to see finally this brought to attention and getting a stop

I thought your video was fantastic, you really touch on some great points regarding manufactures and users positions. What really knocked it out of the park though, was when you touched on availability and pricing models outside of the US. This makes it especially hard for consumers and retailers here in my country. We're wealthy and modern country by anyone's standards but as an export driven country our dollar is kept low against the US making imports expensive, especially in the current climate I expect things like electronics to really push up in price. Not only that but we have a high cost of living here which also pushes up the price a bit. At the time of writing the FOREX rate means 1 USD buys 1.65 NZD, not bad if you're an American buying NZ commodities! But if I go the other way it can sting. As a comparison at the time of writing a 4TB WD Red drive costs $154 USD whereas the same drive can be found in the US for $120 USD. This price difference will only increase as these prices will be based on previous pricing locked in before COVID, as economic forces shift that price will too based on the next price hedging negotiations.

What about small businesses in the IT that live from setup of the systems for other small businesses? This makes us look bad and incompetent!

A few days ago I made a video about this topic and my conclusion was that companies won't change their policies and they will get away with it. In fact, why would they if SSD manufacturers still sell Dram-less drives without a clear indication of what they are?

Well said. I love that we have technologies like SMR for those who need it, I understand why new technologies need to be pushed to gain popularity, but for a few dollars savings per drive they're poisoning the industry and I think by doing this, they are building new segmentations of the storage market since individuals are moving to SSDs anyway, they probably just don't care.

Great video Patrick. Will you do a article about the WD red "value" SMR drives, where you look at the WD RED SMR drives in raid? I think people choose disk between 2-6 TB because they currently don't need anymore, not because they can't afforded 8 TB or higher.

Thank you for bringing up the income disparity of the rest of the world. My 2TB HDD recently just crashed only after 3.5 years of usage, one that comes with my stock Dell XPS 8910. This has never happened before in my 20 years of usage of PCs, all of my previous HDD lasts way longer than 5 years, easily 7 to 10 years and possibly longer. All of the pictures of my newborn and my personal documents are all gone. It is only later I found out that the failed drive is a SMR drive and all of my previous drives are CMR. I'm from Malaysia, and you are completely spot on when you mentioned the importance of 2TB to 6TB drives. Over here, even 2TB may be a small luxury, so some of us even go for only 1TB option. Remember, Malaysia is not a low income country, it's considered one of the higher middle income countries and even then, not all of us can necessarily afford large capacity drives. Some can, but the masses can't. Had I know about SMR earlier, I would have just either opted for a more expensive CMR drive or reduce my capacity for an equivalent priced CMR.

Thanks for the content really interesting.. 100% agree disclosure is key for Trust. Manufacturers should tell us and give us options.. so i can choose to pay a couple of euros more to replace a 2TB disk in my nas. i can't afford to replace all disks to 10TB but i have one disk that failed so now i'm looking to replace 2 disks and i'm going for the more expensive CMR..

I got caught up in this. Bought a 4TB WD red in UK. Managed to get it returned and refunded (direct purchase from WD) replaced with a Seagate Ironwolf 4TB. Very similar characteristics, slightly cooler & slower (My preference, don't use NAS for pure speed)

Now to determine the drive info from those Dell and HP server array cards. You know, old ones that we previously bought drives for. Luckily, I had a few WD black drives for them.

It's not even a matter of affordability, it's the issue of a lack of disclosure. Some people want the cheapest $/Gb others want the performance. Many people won't care if they are SMR or not, but those who will and those who want to know should be told.

Just bought two external 5TB WD drives - Elements and Passport. Each of them is super slow after I've copied 4,5TB of data. I didn't know what's going on until today when I've found that this crap called SMR replaced old good drives. Well done WD, well done...

Clicked this video thinking it would be ASMR drives spinning

I'm always in the market for more drives for my RAID setups. This has made my choice easier as WD is not on the table for me any more. My research will now have to include confirmation of CMR. I've always trusted Seagate and I have no reason yet to switch.

It’s seems that SMR drives should be used ONLY as an archival backup mirroring for SSD active drives!

data loss at ntfs boot drive on smr HDD when sudden power off

Total agree with the disclosure is the big thing. Anyone in the UK you may have a claim against WD is you purchased a Red drive with SMR, under the sales of goods act, as the drive isn't fit for the purpose it was sold. I'm just glad I'm removing 4TB Red from my NAS already. Sadly I've left to Uk so can't use the sales of goods act.

I would spend more for a CMR drive if I had the option. I don't like that they are being sneaky about it. I don't like the performance hit that SMR provides. I had got a couple SMR drives because they were not telling the difference in the spec and had to send them back because they significantly dropped the performance of my ZFS pool.

These drives are sold into consumer markets and that means WD, WG and Toshib walk directly into the jaws of CONSUMER protection laws. What's at issue is the principle of equivalence: a manufacturer can substitute something of EQUAL quality for an established product. What they can't do is substitute something that is "almost" the same, or which will break badly when the product is used in ways the old device was fine with. A drive that works fine for 10 minutes of writes then turns to custard fails that test miserably and if the drivemakers are giving any trouble of kickback on this then the first port of call for most people culd be small claims filings - the reason being that it's cheap and quick to file, hearings are quick and you WILL get all your filing fees back when you win and lawyers are banned from small claims courts.

raid can be done with smr drives, it requires software or hardware updates, but, i have seen a few setups personally that actually dont write to the raid as the primary write, but to a high speed 10-15k rpm drives in raid, then, shifting the data to the storage raid, the software when rebuilding, has to be aware of SMR and that its going to have longer pauses and waits during rebuild. honestly, what i would like to see them do, is move to multi head stacks, i have tested drives in the past that used a single platter with its own heads, as the primary write platter, and another stack that starts to shift data to platters that are almost entirely written in SMR just having a small data section for rebuild/recovery use, the only down side was honestly that the test units we got to test were 5.25" drives. i suggested they do a different method if they use a 5.25 bay, use laptop/vrap size hardware, and just use a controller that can run the hardware with enough capacity and perf that, it may actually interest the market, as i pointed out, many geeks i know would be glad to buy a 5.25 bay drive if the perf+capacity are competitive, i also pointed out they could just use their own controller with 2.5" drives and a custom controller to combine them and manage buffer vs smr storage i suggested they look into using a setup thats in effect a mini-nas, you can mount in a system and connect with sata or sas. i also suggested something i know both server and home users would buy if done by a major company, that they use drives in a heavy SMR mode but, in a raid5 type setup, with an NVME ssd or 2 also being installed as massive cache, like i pointed out to somebody i know at WD, if their company made an external that used an M.2 (nvme or msata), or just sata ssd, as a cache on their external usb-c drives, they could sell drives that offer very very good perf, without a huge boost to cost, since they could use their own hardware just come up with a usb-c controller that can do that(their raid enclosures show they shouldnt have to work too hard to come up with, in effect, a hybrid drive, thats actually 2 in 2 enclosure.. as i pointed out, the main thing i have seen fail on SSHD/hybrid drives is the ssd cache totally taking a shit.. and..well... its also never a big enough cache to make the kind of difference most people would ask for... imho the smr thing, it should be easily identified not the games they keep playing, every company is doing this now... note: i still prefer HGST branded drives... goharddrive sell them refurb for excellent prices... 3-5 year warranty.. lowest fail rate of any company/brand every time i check fail rates for hdd's.. i know WD own them, but.. well.. lower fail rates are better...seagate really havent impressed me since they dropped to 1 year warranty and...i had to rma 3/4 of the drives i got from them during that time, ithin the first year, but the rest...within a few years...failed... wd, toshiba and hgst drives from the era... much lower fail rates... (i had 3 1tb drives of 4, that had head crashes within the first year of my own drives but, used seagate almost exclusivly back then and... well... customers/clients...all ended up quite unhappy with seagate... i got bitched out more then a few times by people upset it was taking so long for seagate to return replacements...then they get their full raid array replaced at once just to be sure, with a note on the RMA about needing matching drives, only to get back 4x1tb drives...from 4 different product lines... all refurb.. 2 that chucked bad sectors on a full format... 2 more rma's later they upgraded him to 2tb drives that did match, and had been pre-tested and formatted fully with zero smart errors... even after that.. within the year 1 had fully failed and one was failed by SMART due to havign too many bad sectors... anyway..yeah... not really a huge fan of having so few storage makers honestly... but... unless somebody comes out with a cheap high capacity, high reliability replacement for current HDD tech... we will be stuck with less then ideal solutions. imho, we are going to see more hybrid arrays, with ssd cache, feeding into large arrays of drives, often SMR drives im sure. i am told that people are working on linux os and software raid fixes that identify smr drives and handle them accordingly, understanding they will have times they have to pause and shift data to SMR sectors. what i think may be more ideal, is actually looking at the SSHD/Hybrid drive idea again, but, rather then 8gb cache, make 64-128g on top of a large 256-512m cache, for the mech section, making it so that a 64g cache drive actually has 128g of flash, wear leveled so that the ssd portion should never fail, with how cheap you can get small ssd's now, i have used a few on friends systems with primocache as L2 read/write cache for their raid arrays, used an old 240g with provision tweaked to leave 200g formatted capacity, on an array a friend has of 8x2tb wd black drives, that hes got in some form of raid with up to 2 drives failing at once, with no data loss, hes now got it mirrored to a mirrored raid of a couple shucked wd 8tb drives.

Thanks for the heads up. Building raid 6 server to store dead wife pics and videos. Using 4 1tb Seagate SkyHawk Surveillance drives

To me this issue is a simple one....their lack of disclosure denies me my right of choice and that could have detrimental consequences to my data. Imagine you are alergic to shelfish, walking into a restaurant that did not disclose that some of their key ingredients include shelfish.... We consumers are not foolish and would like to be given the opportunity to choose. If the pice of a 2TB SMR drive is say $70 and a CMR is say $85 I may very well choose to pay the extra for the CMR as I know what the consequences are in my specific use case which may be high random data write use. On the other hand if I just need a drive for say my weekly data backup I may choose SMR....but give me the choice!

Some people have smaller use cases and they still want benefits of having more spindles in the RAID arrays. They don’t necessary pay less than the one who buy fewer but larger drives.

Well said and it's sad this happened but i saw this coming. To be honest @ home i don't have a lot of real "mission critical data" where i need constant access to and most of it is stored and spread on several DAS devices some with raid setup and multiple copies instead of a cheap NAS it's a bit off a hassle but for my use case it works (fast transfer speeds on those TB of data matter more) Now I'm looking to centralize that and also include my whole true 4K media collection but i'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to that (design, hardware choice,performance) because of what i see /use @ work and that's why it's taking ages and a small fortune. So i started and finished the network portion first 10 Gbit everywhere at least. All my clients have basic ssd and i can even saturate 1O Gbit with only 2 clients and 4TB raid zero NvMe disk setup so i needed some future proofing on that. I'm building the server and it's backup server now but those WD red drives i never favored for some reason. Also where i live they are overpriced for what seemed an ordinary hdd and i never understood there popularity the basic ironwolf line are cheaper here but they are also price hyped because everyone has a "NAS"and you need them. I found the new Exos X line for cheaper even I'm looking for the bigger 10TB + drives (limited with the amount of disks on my servers) but those "prosumer" disk are price and spec hyped for a while now and have their fanboys so do research if it involves critical data.

1-st time viewer: LOVE that winking!

Good video! I really liked it! comparing 1Tb SSD with 1Tb HDD makes no sense ... what about €/Tb ratio? storage necessity? and usages? Redundancy? security? RAID? NAS?

I have a 16TB raid array messed up due to SMR drives (WD RED) … checksum errors during verify.... cant mount reFS.. shows up as raw.

That they, WD, Seagate, and Toshiba, need to use SMR to compete is fine as long as they tell all their consumers why they are using this design. This wouldn't have come to a head like this if they had seen fit to provide that information in the first place. Now they are being dragged over the coals for that minor oversite.

Just add an extra character in the model name and standardized across a company have the drive type encoded. CMR, CMR with helium, SMR, ect. The amount of CMR on SMR disk would be really nice to know. I’m now weary to recommend any WD red drives.

This is a problem for at least some 5 years now, SMR drives all over the place and no one knows which ones use SMR or it takes some damn time digging to find out. Why not make it clear? No one wants SMR but HDD markers want easier way to make higher capacities so even 4TB drives may have SMR and you gotta select the correct model to not get one with SMR, or you order one model but get a single number different one which does have SMR because seller sucks at differentiating the specific differences down to the precise model code.

I can't find this article from Toshiba anywhere. The link is broken on their own website.

I wonder if all the portable USB external spinning drives these days are now SMR because most can't tell the difference in that market.

So the older RED drives still would be CMR drives? How do you find out by part number or serial if your drive is SMR or CMR?

What drives in the 2-4 TB range do you recommend for a zfs box now ?

WD Red: EFRX = PMR, EFAX = SMR

Thanks for your insights. I'd like to ask, is this really as big of a deal for RAID systems as people make it out to be? I come from a perspective of "never trust the disks". This is why backups and HA (if you can afford it) are so important. There seems to be a case that the disks are perhaps slower to resilver or restore a RAID to a healthy (undegraded) state. But how big of a deal is this? I must be honest, I never knew that CMR/SMR technologies were a thing before this scandal so I place less emphasis on it than many others. While my perspective of the OEMs is altered due to these events, I'm not necessarily willing to write any of them off or boycott them (yet). I'm curious if someone can boil down to a non-storage-expert why I should worry about this and whether it's worth the time increased expense to worry about it. Why upgrade to CMR disks when I could instead buy more SMR disks for larger redundancy or backup arrays?

Dude, they were not even listed on the Spec sheet or even the FREAKING MANUAL FOR The hard drive. SMR might be expected in Archive drives but not on the RAID focus Red Drive or seagate Barracuda drives. . This is criminal.

Are these SMR drives fine for desktop use where it's just the media drive?

SMR even on desktop is going to fragment as the disk fills on consumer systems and it will start to feel like that system is frozen. We live in the age of young KZfaqr and kids will fill up the family computer.

Just received a new ST8000DM004 yesterday, and there's another problem. It's marked ""HDD sold as a component of OEM solution and not for resale. the product warranty does not cover HDD if removed from OEM solution." This despite still being in sealed packaging. The warranty then is with the reseller and not Seagate. This is a fishy arrangement. Fortunately the fact it uses SMR is not a problem for me, it will only ever be used for large file dumps and not as part of a RAID, so it's a good use match for this drive type.

When the table came out. I immediately checked my drives. Thankfully, none if my REd drives are SMR. Even the new one. So yeah. WD should have stayed with CMR with the RED drives at least. It maybe okay with the BLUE but not on RED, Purple or BLACK.

Yeah, I got screwed on my first NAS at the beginning of the year. Bought (2) WD Red 6tbs - **thought** I was buying good NAS drives, turned out I got cheated

For a single data storage device in my computer, used for say music and movies, are the SMR drives less reliable? or just lower inconsistant performance? If it is just the latter I think I am ok with that if it meant I get cheaper drive. Problem is drives have not changed much in price for literally years.

I have 4 3tb WD reds from back in 2013 i got 4 more for a RAID 6 i wonder if they switched to SMR during the run because all 4 new WD Reds i got in 2019 would not play nice with my LSI RAID card ERRORS ALL OVER!!!! I had to return all 4 drives.. so SMR was a complete FAIL! and wasted my Fing time... So the RED drives that are made for NAS and RAID setup are not supposed to be use in NAS and RAID setups???

This is making that older 3tb Hitachi refurbished drive for $40 look like a good reliable option.

I have a Dell PE R610 with 6 WD RED 4TB (non pro) drives in ZFS2, do I have to worry about my data being safe on the long run? Its running super solid for 3 years now (can't say that from my "consumer" NAS I had before) I needed a bit more power and someone told me to get THIS combo but now I'm a bit concerned about the reds in ZFS2.

Well, by trying to squeeze a tiny bit more profit out of WD Red sales, I'd say WD has probably utterly tanked those sales entirely now. Nobody in their right mind is going to buy WD Red for a NAS now, unless they haven't heard of this issue.

If WD maintains the SMR Drives are not intended for Raid applications then why are the marketed as NAS drives?

I wonder if my backups on my wd red are usable....

I went through all this grief 5 months ago, trying to replace a faild 6TB RED. Finaly figured out that either WD deliberaly lied, or more likely are incompentent (no-one in testing actually thought about what replacing a drive in an array actually entails). I returned the drive as faulty and bought a different branded NAS drive. I will never buy another WD drive. I realize its an emotional response, but I choose not to deal with people I can't trust.

You seem to be ignoring the fact that people use lower capacity drives to reduce rebuild time and as such reduce the risk of failure. So it's not just about their price. Also not everyone needs that much storage. So it's not about having the opertunity or the means, it's about picking the right drive for your setup. E.g. I know people who bought we red as opposed to the pro because they wanted the lower spindle speed.

It's easy to tell before you buy - look at the CACHE. Example, a Seagate 2TB w/64MB is NOT an SMR drive, it is a PMR drive. But a Seagate 2TB w/128MB or more is a SMR drive,

Earlier this year I got myself A new 8-Bay NAS and I still had my old 4 drives (WD40EFRX) but could not use these since the spec sheet states that they are for use in 1 to 5 bay units So I got newer drives (WD40EFAX) I did not pick RED PRO drives because in my opinion they are to noisy and well the array in the new unit Broke and on rebuild Crashed in both Raid5 and Raid6 setups So I contacted WD Since I had an idea of what was going on after hearing about the Drives being SMR (What I tried to avoid because it's bad for what I do) So they currently gave me 2 options to provide replacements for the WD40EFAX ... The first one ... WD40EFRX ... I Really get the idea that WD Are Idiots at this point since those Are the drives that I needed replacement for because of the 8 Bay NAS I have The other one ... WD4003FFBX ... Yeah ... I don't get it because I already told them That those Are to noisy in my opinion (But For those who don't care about the noise and are in a similar situation like me ... Contact WD since they seem to be willing to replace the Red Drives that Have SMR with Red Pro Drives) So I am still waiting what WD would do next since I don't Agree with there current choices

SMR should only be used as a bridging technology between SSD and magnetic tape in datacenters. SMR is not suitable for consumers. With this scandal I predict that consumer devices will finally shift away from HDDs completely. The pulling forces from the NVMe SSDs in PS5 and XBOX SX and the coming shift to 12VO PSUs will make it hard to justify SATA HDDs (especially SMR HDDs) in the consumer space. If you need more storage as a consumer there will still be some CMR HDDs available for use in NAS and similar use cases for a while yet.

I have had to replace a bunch of older Red drives in the last few months... Now I don't know what ones are SMR or what. Do I replace all 24 Red drives?! I guess my next array will be another brand. This will likely effect consumer choices in the future... it will certainly steer me away from WD.

Western Digital as a brand is now dead to me for the foreseeable future. I have exclusively purchased and recommended WD drives since the mid 2000s when the rash of dying seagate drives made WD the obvious choice for reliability. In the past year I have set up three NAS at home and work all using WD Reds, and while I have based on their current disclosures dodged this bullet, I just don't trust them anymore. Who knows, in the coming months we may learn that 'SOME' 8TB and 10TB models are also affected, or that this also impacts a 'small number' of black or gold drives. They have lied by omission and sold a product which is totally unsuitable to normal NAS usage as a NAS product, putting their customers at risk of data loss during failed rebuilds. At this point all we can do is spread the word and leave appropriate product reviews to warn the unaware until WD stops selling dangerously misleading products.

thanks for mentioning cost -- i find 8TB smr drives to be very expensive ..my photo collection has exceeded 4tb so i need to up-size -- it took 2 years to save up enough money for just 1 8tb smr -- now saving for another -- computer stuff is very expensive for poor people

This is a major trust breaker in WD for me. Hearing the others also switched silently without any spec sheet indication and clear labeling on some consumer/SMB drives is worrying, but WD doing it on their RED and BLACK series (although black only for one 2.5" capacity) will make me take my money elsewhere the next time i'm buying HDD storage. They broke their own sub-brands/series, and you can't trust their consumer/SMB labeling anymore. For specifically non-essential archival storage or a drive to dump data to for mid-long term and delete/overwrite contents bulked SMR may be overall beneficial if the cost delta is big enough. Though I've been moving more to keeping online backups of anything essential and SSDs for any frequently accessed data. My local HDD bulk storage is mostly for convenience at this point, but also serves as another logical/physical instance for backups. I wouldn't trust a single physical or logical instance of storage with anything i couldn't afford to lose.

Wow.... now I'm freak out... i got my nas to save my family's memories, i just got my Synology and to start 2 4tb Pro thinking that the "word Pro" was for better product, but now I am scared. I don't want to lose my memories of my family. Is there any recommendation, I did start with 2 hdd to start, planning to add ssd in the future when price drops. I have the Synology 1019+, but now What should I do? Any recommendation?

I'm still having difficulty wrapping my head around this, the only downside I've really learned from this video with regards to SMR is the lower end random read and write performance. I can gather from the conclusion and the comments that SMR is dangerous for certain types of RAID arrays and arrays that currently contain CMR drives, but exactly how they are hasn't really been explained all that well to me in the video. This is concerning because I plan to setup a NAS in my own home for data storage in the future. I'd appreciate it if anyone could explain these dangers to more elaborately.

Would like to see a Bigfoot type of drive make a comeback. A 5.25 Hard drive with a larger platters on the inside. Use CMR as default.

"ZFS Just made it into a major linux distro yesterday." What? I've been using native ZFS in Ubuntu since 16.04. Where have you been?