After reading the new reply to the below thread, I re-investigated WD Red’s lack of web page on Western Digital’s site. It is still missing, but more completely so. Here is the old thread;
Has Western Digital made the WD Red HDDs go away?
The Plus and Pro lines are still present. As are the WD Red NVMe & SATA SSD. But, it appears that Western Digital got fed up with the Red HDD line. Amazon, and probably others, still have the WD Red HDDs still for sale.
Interesting if true. WD finally admits it was a poor idea to introduce SMR in the NAS line.
It’s not just that. It’s that they tried to play dumb and gaslight their customers, until enough of a scene was made that they could no longer ignore it and had to come clean.
In other words, I believe they would still dismiss this issue, to this day, if there wasn’t a backlash against them. That screams of rank dishonesty.
For the record, I’m only purchasing Seagates (Exos) for my NAS HDDs from now on.
Platter capacity kept increasing (not fast enough to remain ahead of SSDs, but that’s another story), and the difference between CMR and SMR is not really large enough to be attractive : 26 TB vs. 32 TB.
So, yes, I suppose that SMR is pretty much dead for the consumer 3.5" HDD market. It may still live for external 2.5" drives… as long as these still exist. And some hyperscalers may still want the highest possible capacity in their data centres. But consumers can no longer be bothered.
I read this as: The Silent EOL is here. Disappointing but not surprising about existing customers. It looks like a CTRL+Z on a change that they never should have made.
Meaning, this should have always been true: WD RED = WD RED PRO
It was True when it was launched. But for whatever reason, halfway through the lifecycle, it was FALSE. But now its True again? SMR does not deserve to be qual’d as NAS ready.
I’m not surprised, they want to hide that part of their history as it’s probably affecting their sales.
I wont be buying WD for the foreseeable future as I was unfortunate enough to have unknowingly obtained one of the SMR 6TB Red drives, but was fortunate enough to have it replaced by the retailer after the whole scandal was uncovered…
To be clear, part of the problem with WD Red SMR disks, was a firmware bug.
Normal disks, SSD, CMR, whatever, allow reading sectors that have not been written. This goes back decades before the turn of the century.
BUT, along comes Western Digital Red SMR disks. It appears that from the factory, SMR tracks are not pre-populated. This causes sector not found errors when reading a block of sectors that include both written and not yet written sectors. ZFS seems to be the only file system that does this, live.
What I mean is that if you ran a simple read test, you would likely find such problems. But, if you did a full disk write & verify test, the problem would not appear. And from that moment on, it would never appear.
At least that is how I read that problem with WD Red SMR HDDs.
It would have been trivial to fix. If the sector look up table said the sector had not yet been written, return a ZERO sector. (A sector full of zeros…) Trivial. But, some firmware engineer decided it was a SERIOUS ERROR to read a sector that had not been written. Dumb *ss.
Now does this make SMR disks suitable for NAS?
Not really.
But, Seagate’s Archive SMR disks, of which I own an 8TB model, don’t have this problem. It works fine for me as a backup disk, (though slowly…).
I want to start this by saying I’ve always preferred WD over Seagate, and I LOVE HGST drives…which is now core WD tech. So I say all of this with that understood
But to be fair still, CMR WD Reds are of OG CMR WD Green decent. Enough of you will remember having fun with wdilde3, and that ancient annoyance still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. So when I see RED SMR drives all I can think of is “Oh here we go again”
But Yeah, if fairness you’re not wrong…
Those things have proven the test of time at this point. I concede they have their place now. lol. We’ll all live with SMR in some fashion I guess.
SMR does not deserve to be qual’d as NAS ready.