They wrote the article like someone who uses ZFS though. We’ll talk about the best drives for each purpose (e.g. Robert, that video is very hard to follow. From the brief I now know the 3TB drives I bought for my Synology are CMR. Obviously this CMR cache will have a limited capacity, and with enough write operations can be exhausted. I know I’m being a d!ck here but the video has a much more thorough impact assessment while this is more showing the testing behind what’s being said in the video. Compare this with the “INFECTED” SMR drive list, and you’re good to go! We do want to point out that we likely want to see a more rigorous drive certification process at iXsystems, but also that they at least have done a good job communicating it on their blog. I had such a great week too. It’s nice to see the Will cameo in a video too. I will also say that a likely part of the problem here is that these are DM-SMR drives that hide the fact they are SMR from the host. WD technicians don’t have a way to query the drive and ask for the model number?? Note that currently, the MAX capacity drive using SMR is the 6TB WD60EFAX, with 3 platters / 6 heads… So… is that it?? To be crystal clear, I knew what SMR was, and that the drive used it. Ektich we load test every drive before we replace them in customer systems to ensure we aren’t using a faulty drive. That’s terrible practice. Still, it is a good step. Their insight into the drive being used while doing the rebuild is great too. They go way too in-depth on the technical side, but when you’re looking at it, they did a less good experiment. Customers MUST be informed of this new tech, even those using EXTERNAL SINGLE DRIVES ENCLOSURES!!! Has anyone tested this? Plus, I’d like to see some stock hardware RAID devices tested along the same lines. Just read this bollocks: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr-disks-arent-great-but-theyre-not-garbage/2/. (2) WDC WD40EFRX-68N32N0 : 4000,7 GB [2/0/0, sa1] – wd With that said, all of the tested drives were disconnected as soon as their previous benchmarks were complete, and before plugging them back in for use in our test NAS array. In an attempt to add additional stress to the scenario, during the resilver some load will be placed upon the array; 1MB files will be copied to the array over the network, and 2TB of data will be read from the array and copied over the network to a secondary device. I second the motion to re-test with Linux MD-RAID. Good analysis. The short version is that they advise against use of these drives. Just read this bollocks: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr-disks-arent-great-but-theyre-not-garbage/2/. That said, his personal IT motto has to be "if it's not broke, don't fix it" so sometimes the old ways are best. Now we’re going to switch to Seagate. You don’t test a drive before putting it into a rebuild scenario? Thank you for the article and thank you in particular Will for the link to the WD Product brief. About 5 years ago I bought a Seagate 8TB Archive SMR disk for backing up my FreeNAS. I didn’t specifically checked for it back then because, you know, N300 series. Replacing with 1 SMR disk. There are other NAS vendors who are staying silent on this issue, even if they utilize ZFS and these WD Red SMR drives. Most people do not understand how complex SMR is when data needs to be moved from a bottom shingled track. Paste it to a text editor, and voila!!! WD Red = CMR, WD Pink = SMR. (EDIT -> COPY or CTRL-C). While all three CMR drives comfortably completed the resilver in under 17 hours, the SMR drive took nearly 230 hours to perform an identical task. Was there nobody on the team who realised the consequences? I already changed motherboard once because I thought it was a motherboard issue. I received a phone call from the rep this morning. The other three drives in the array remain consistent. If you want another 3rd party description of this, you can see the great 2015 paper by Toshiba: Shingled Magnetic Recording Technologies for Large-Capacity Hard Disk Drives. 🙂 Great to see some hard facts related to this after reading about it from others. We wanted to present a real-world use case with ZFS so our readers have some sense of the impact. So, if anyone needs to know WHAT INTERNAL DRIVE MODEL they have in their WD EXTERNAL ENCLOSURES, install https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo and COPY PAST the info to the clipboard! Western Digital 4TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive - 7200 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD4003FFBX ... and lower power consumption. Using older WD Reds in a server with ZFS raid, and thinking about buying more on sale… big eye opener here. I’m guessing the CMR model is an older one as I bought mine a few years ago now. First up is CMR, which stands for conventional magnetic recording. They are also not doing a realistic test since it seems they are not putting a workload on the NAS during rebuilds? These targeted tests are not designed to be comprehensive, but instead, illuminate any obvious differences between the SMR drive and its CMR competitors. Next, we are going to get to our test results before getting to our final words. While I expect the drive failures, I also look for a predictable level of performance during operation and rebuilds. I think this is the link you are looking for: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-red-hdd/product-brief-western-digital-wd-red-hdd.pdf. Ars articles always lack the depth of real reporting, but do provide an entertainment factor and many times the commenters have much more insight (which is what I love finding and reading). But, selling SMR as a NAS drive, AND not clearly labeling it, (like Red Lite), that should be criminal. Feel free to listen along while you read. CONCLUSION: one more checkbox to check when buying drives, not SMR? I truly would like to know in order to make a decision. And really nobody (you, too) mentions how inefficient this is in case of power consumption as all the reading and writing while moving the data on a top shingle consumes energy while an CMR drive is sleeping all the time. Checked the invoice and they are marked as WD40EFRX (phew)…. Based on my time with those drives, I was expecting much poorer results. On the WD Red drives, the 64MB cache CMR drives are still available and worked great in our testing. As a perpetual dabbler, he is always open to new solutions for old problems. Robert Dole, Great article as always. It seems like a marketing TEST!!! So glad I got 12TB Toshibaa N300’s last year that are CMR. 1,171 Followers, 292 Following, 11 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from abdou now online (@abdoualittlebit) It is indeed a good sign to see STH calling BS when it is… BS. If you round to nearest day it’s 10 days not 9. 1) For higher NAS use stay away from SMR HDD, and QLC SSD’s. Great article as always. Has anyone tested this? I wonder to what extent can performance be regained with its use. Does it strongly depend on the Type of RAID and Filesystem ? They’re using different size drives, more drives, they’re not putting a workload and just letting it rebuild. (EDIT -> COPY or CTRL-C). Do I need an expensive CMR (Ironwolf Helium), a “cheaper” SMR Red NAS drive or will a standard barracuda 8TB SMR “Archive Drive suffice”, for Media (Plex) and Photos. At the start you’d think he’s anti-WD but by the end you realize he’s actually anti-Red SMR. Impossible to replace a disk in a RAID5 array, the controller would eventually fail the rebuild. I filed a support request with Seagate. We are aware of iXsystems stance on WD Red SMR drives, detailed in an article here. Good analysis. While I expect the drive failures, I also look for a predictable level of performance during operation and rebuilds. Finally, a FreeNAS RAIDZ resilver was performed. Checked the invoice and they are marked as WD40EFRX (phew)…. We’ve found it fitting to resurrect this WD Blue, Black, Green, Red, and Purple drive naming scheme explanation. The RAIDZ resilver test is of particular interest, since the WD Red drive is marketed as a NAS type drive suitable for arrays of up to 8 disks. (2) WDC WD40EFRX-68N32N0 : 4000,7 GB [2/0/0, sa1] – wd I’m also happy to see you tried on a second drive. WD technicians don’t have a way to query the drive and ask for the model number?? Paste it to a text editor, and voila!!! IronWolf Pro, on the other hand is for businesses and digital artists who need extremely high performance from their NAS servers. The drives are Seagate Barracuda ST500LM050 drives from the same or similar batch. You don’t test a drive before putting it into a rebuild scenario? Replacing with 1 SMR disk. The WD40EFAX is demonstrably a worse drive than the CMR based WD40EFRX, and assuming that you have a choice in your purchase the CMR drive is the superior product. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/western-digital-gets-sued-for-sneaking-smr-disks-into-its-nas-channel/, Form to join the class: A great example is http://blog.robiii.nl/2020/04/wd-red-nas-drives-use-smr-and-im-not.html. And upon further investigation I found out that these disks are SMR. The drives are Seagate Barracuda ST500LM050 drives from the same or similar batch. That said, his personal IT motto has to be "if it's not broke, don't fix it" so sometimes the old ways are best. Clearly the problem is with the label on the drive. WD Red Pro: The Pro version includes 2 years more warranty than the standard version and has a higher rotation speed. Prior to beginning this sequence of tests, the drives were prepped by having 3TB of data written to them, and then 1TB of that data is deleted. For single drive installations, the WD40EFAX will likely function without issue. Background: Impossible to replace a disk in a RAID5 array, the controller would eventually fail the rebuild. I am running a 6×2.5″ 500GB RAID10 array for a total of 3TB for my Steam library. The SMR drive has a much larger cache than the CMR version, 256MB vs 64MB, which perhaps helps account for the win here. If people can sue Apple for advertising a phone has 16GB of storage when some of that is taken up by the operating system, those two missing words may make a huge different in the legal circus. Dear Western Digital, you thought you could get away with it because a basic benchmark does not show much difference OR you were not even aware of the issue because you did not test them with RAID. My backup window is not time constrained, I simply let it run until it’s done. I have many WD external drives, and i DON’T WANT any drive with SMR!!! Given the significant performance and capability differential between the CMR WD Red and the SMR model, they should be different brands or lines rather than just product numbers. Stupid WD support… ). Had no idea this was a thing but glad I googled it now. Reds aren’t cheap either, but they’ve previously been good. In short, there was, and in a big way. After the previous article on STH, the question we received was how this impacts arrays. We had two main areas of testing. So they go way into the weeds of commands (that the average QNAP, Synology, Dobo user has no clue about) then say it’s fine… oh but for ZFS its still sucks. Compare this with the “INFECTED” SMR drive list, and you’re good to go! That 9 day and almost 14-hour rebuild means that using the WD Red 4TB SMR drive inadvertently in an array would lead to your data being vulnerable for around 9 days longer than the WD Red 4TB CMR drive or Seagate IronWolf. Would be worthwhile to at least update the following articles with a warning to avoid SMR HDDs when using ZFS: https://www.servethehome.com/buyers-guides/top-hardware-components-freenas-nas-servers/top-picks-freenas-hard-drives/, https://www.servethehome.com/hpe-proliant-microserver-gen10-plus-ultimate-customization-guide/2/. Maybe I’m in the minority here. We have maybe 200 CMR Reds that we’ve bought over the last year. Very interesting, very disconcerting. I filed a support request with Seagate. Using older WD Reds in a server with ZFS raid, and thinking about buying more on sale… big eye opener here. I’m really frustrated. To that end, today we will be comparing a WD Red 4TB SMR drive to its CMR predecessor, as well as CMR drives from other manufacturers. Is WD USING RAID / more demanding users as “guinea pigs” to test SMR and then move on and use SMR on +14TB drives (that currently use HELIUM inside to bypass the theoretical limitation of 6 platters / 12 heads)??? How about that? Is that the next step? I wonder to what extent can performance be regained with its use. This forces the data on the overlapping tracks to be rewritten during the process, which takes extra time to perform. https://www.hattislaw.com/cases/investigations/western-digital-lawsuit-for-shipping-slower-smr-hard-drives-including-wd-red-nas/, I just ordered 3 WD 4TB Red for a new NAS and had no clue! Was there nobody on the team who realised the consequences? I had followed the story on blocksandfiles (.com) and this is really good that it landed on STH and then followed by a testing report. The WD40EFAX turns in performance numbers that are significantly worse than the CMR drives. Even down to external drives needing to be marked in this way. All I can conclude is “don’t replace failed disks in RAIDZ arrays with SMR disks that just came out of heavy load and did not have time to flush their cache. To be crystal clear, I knew what SMR was, and that the drive used it. The performance results achieved by the WD Red WD40EFAX surprised me; my only personal experience with SMR drives prior to this point was with Seagate’s Archive line. How often do you force your marathon runners to run sprints just after they’ve finished the marathon? Now I know I’ve sold my customers FreeNAS hardware that isn’t good. They were apologetic, but then they dropped the bombshell: All Seagate 2.5″ drives are SMR, they no longer make 2.5″ PMR drives. Even with a new motherboard the problem persisted. Things get worse when Steam needs to preallocate storage space for new games, often I have to leave the machine alone for two to three hours. Shucking external drives (which are often SMR) is mentioned on both pages. First up, the new SMR drive has been put through a handful of standard benchmarks just to see how it performs in the context of a larger pool of drives. We utilize a lot of ZFS at STH, so in mid-April 2020 we started a project to see if, indeed, there was a difference. CMR was tested in the same way so I don’t see how its a bad test. We are using a third party service to manage subscriptions so you can unsubscribe at any time. Friends don’t let friends use SMR drives for NAS. If we’d said 10 days, someone could come along and say we were exaggerating the issue. First up is the file copy test. In some ways, this is like timing a runner’s sprint time after running a marathon. At the start you’d think he’s anti-WD but by the end you realize he’s actually anti-Red SMR. Your video and web are usually much closer to 1 another. It’s important that you understand MTBF and solid state drive failure rates before making any type of purchases. Get the best of STH delivered weekly to your inbox. Testing commenced immediately after the drive prep was completed. So take your time and pick your storage depending on your needs. Data is written on magnetic tracks that are side-by-side, do not overlap, and write operations on one track do not affect its neighbors. would be interesting to see RAID rebuild time on a more conventional RAID setup. As an individual drive, the WD40EFAX is performing pretty well in these benchmarks. They were priced like new WD Red 10TB 😉. There @Patrick is saying how much he loves WD Red (CMR) drives while using this to show why he doesn’t like the SMR drives. We did not experience this failure mode, and instead only received extremely poor performance. It takes balls to do it but know I appreciate it. I’m fine with the drive makers selling SMR drives. Yes, there is an array running here, due to the brilliance of picking drives from different production runs and vendors, that has half SMR and half CMR. At the end of the youtube, it clearly shows a WD produced spec sheet that shows which drives are SMR vs CMR. here they compared a Rebuild with mixed drives and the results were not as sever ? On top of which you badly tried to cover it up before finally facing it up. I don’t want a mechanical disk that overlaps tracks and has to write adjacent tracks just to write a specific track!!! Initially it worked reasonably fast, but as time went on, it slowed down. Even down to external drives needing to be marked in this way. I had followed the story on blocksandfiles (.com) and this is really good that it landed on STH and then followed by a testing report. However, it’s a good idea that … This is important because it touches on those who are not just buying a new set of drives for an array, but instead is a commonly-known case where a user may have to purchase a drive quickly to get a NAS back to a healthy state as soon as possible. Either is bad. Now I know I’ve sold my customers FreeNAS hardware that isn’t good. Even with a cache flush they’re hitting steady state because of the rebuild. So they can target “specific” markets with the SMR drives? Robert – I generally look for low-cost CMR drives, and expect that they will fail on me. When data is written on a SMR drive the data on the overlapping tracks will be affected by the write process as well. Since then, I standardized on 10 TB which are CRM. I will NEVER buy another EXTERNAL WD drive again without the warranty to check the internal drive MODEL first!!!! At the end of the youtube, it clearly shows a WD produced spec sheet that shows which drives are SMR vs CMR. Ars articles always lack the depth of real reporting, but do provide an entertainment factor and many times the commenters have much more insight (which is what I love finding and reading). (1) WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0 : 2000,3 GB [1/0/0, sa1] – wd They are using smaller capacity drives with different NAS systems. In either case, we suggest not using them. I saw that Ars piece. Since then, I standardized on 10 TB which are CRM. AFAIK, the SMR Reds support the TRIM command. In these kinds of shorter burst activity workloads, one can see how SMR may be used as a substitute. CMR was tested in the same way so I don’t see how its a bad test. page https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-hdd. Even after it came out we thought the experiment worthwhile since the number of users that read the iXsystems blog is likely a minority, even among STH readers. To keep the comparison, use the same disk configuration of 4 x 4TB CMR disk in a RAID-5. But, selling SMR as a NAS drive, AND not clearly labeling it, (like Red Lite), that should be criminal. You have entered an incorrect email address! I needed 3 x 10TB drives, I went with barely used open-box HSGT He10 on eBay (all 2019 models with around 1,000 hours usage). So, if anyone needs to know WHAT INTERNAL DRIVE MODEL they have in their WD EXTERNAL ENCLOSURES, install https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo and COPY PAST the info to the clipboard! They wrote the article like someone who uses ZFS though. I use ZFS on it, with snapshots, so it actually stores multiple backups. There was no information on whether the drives are SMR or PMR, and there were NO indication whatsoever that they should not be used in RAID arrays. According to iXsystems, WD Red SMR drives running firmware revision 82.00A82 can cause the drive to enter a failed state during heavy loads using ZFS. I’m guessing the CMR model is an older one as I bought mine a few years ago now. Great piece STH. Purpose built for multi-user NAS environments, IronWolf is perfect for teams needing to store more and work faster. One could argue that you may not transfer 125GB files every day, but that is less data than the video production folder for this article’s companion video we linked at the start. Why keep SMR and PMR drives with the SAME capacity in the same line and HIDING this info from customers? The WD40EFAX is the only SMR drive in the comparison and is the focus of the testing. Great article, thanks for the info. Specifically, RAID arrays our readers use. So take your time and pick your storage depending on your needs. But the question for me (as somebody who is about to buy a new NAS as a media hub for Videos and Photos) I still have two old st4000dm005 lying around and would use them and upgrade two additional a cheap 8TB (SMR – st8000dm004) or with the whole SMR NAS drive debate, a very expensive CMR Ironwolf or something like that ? Yes, there is an array running here, due to the brilliance of picking drives from different production runs and vendors, that has half SMR and half CMR.