Is WD red even an option after the SMR scandal?

TrueNAS General
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I have been finalizing what i want to buy…

Then i remembered the wd red fiasco. But I also read Seagate generally fails more often?

Which Nas drive should i get?

Toshiba doesnt have warranty where i live

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I’ve been using 4TB Ironwolf drives for around 3 years now. At least until today i have 0 Issues with them.

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Generally, whatever suitable CMR drive you can get for the best price per terabyte…

There are no SMR drives in NAS lines above 10 TB—and, in my perhaps-not-so-humble opinion, spinning drives smaller than that are only suitable as doorstops nowadays: Go SSD for small capacities.
Some Seagate models have been known to fail early. If I remember correctly, the worst offenders were 1.5 TB drives—see above.

The main concern right now is about unscrupulous Chia miners having offloaded their old drives as “refurbished” down the retail channel. Agin, the issue was first identified on Seagate drives, thanks to proprietary extra information in SMART reports, but the issue is not confined to Seagate.

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I have three drives in my homeserver, all 4TB.

  • Toshiba N300
  • WD Red Plus
  • Seagate ironwolf

The Seagate is now 3 years old and the others are 1,5 Years old.
they are all fine. The only things that stood out to me where:

  • The Seagate runs 8 °C hotter in idle than the others. Regardless of the slot its in.
  • The WD Red Plus had the only checksum error in that time. That itself is statistically insignificant if not many more users report similar things.
  • The Toshiba sounds really nice. No Joke. I kinda like hearing it do things. Otherwise just doing it’s job

edit: markdown syntax

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One more reference to check CMR for WD

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I had very weird and inconsistent SMART readings from Ironwolves, so I returned that batch. I use Scrutiny to monitor the health of all my drives.

I use Red Plus now and did not encounter any problems so far.

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FWIW, I bought a bunch of used hard drives from goharddrive.com. They offer a decent warranty (up to 5 years, depends on model), do not quibble re: returns, and the price is right.

In my most recent purchase, I chose HGST CMR He10’s for the low price of about $76 a pop with a 5 year warranty. All drives passed the badblocks, etc. tests and are now waiting for the current batch of drives to start failing.

An added bonus is being able to buy He-filled, low power drives at capacities that are no longer manufactured.

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Some time ago, (perhaps a year?), I noticed that Western Digital no longer advertised WD Red drives. They still have WD Red Plus and Red Pros on their web site, but plain “Red” drives have disappeared completely. (Well, I did not check the documentation or support sections, just the product section…)

So, it does appear that Western Digital has finally acknowledged the Truth!
SMR for NAS suck!

Of course, before that, they sold the WD Red Pluses at a higher cost than the same size in SMR Red… With all the “free” exchanges they had to do, it probably cost them a lot of money, so the Red Pluses are not likely going to drop in price.

Gee, if I thought about it, I could have bought hundreds of WD Red SMRs, waited until the store return policy expired and then had Western Digital replace every single one with a Red Plus! For a free upgrade!

I am not serious about the last paragraph. Just expressing my anger at the subtle replacement of CMR with SMR HDDs into a perfectly functioning product line. I mean if they wanted to introduce the “WD Red minus” or “WD Red budget” or the “WD Red cheap”, basically anything obviously different, okay. But, what they did was in my opinion criminal.

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That move absolutely sucked, yet Red Plus are a decent offer now.

So what is one supposed to do?

Feels like my current Volkswagen/Skoda Yeti. I had a leasing contract for the previous model. That one with the “scandal diesel”. So when the leasing contract expired I returned it, although at the start I absolutely intended to buy the car.

And then I leased and subsequently bought the successor with the new proper engine and catalytic converter for nitrogen dioxide and on the one hand this is the best car I ever owned and on the other hand I hate that I gave Volkswagen another deal.

:man_shrugging:

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Is this you?

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They make good cars though.

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I have Toshiba N300’s in my server and they work well so far. Maybe not good for you because of the warranty, but others might want to check it out.

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If anything, the whole SMR fiasco caused the vendors to clearly label if the NAS drives were CMR or SMR.

In checking NewEgg, a Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS Hard Drive, as of this writing, is going for $180. A SAMSUNG 870 QVO Series 2.5" 8TB currently goes for $624. Both are the lowest prices listed. As that is a 250% increase in the price of storage, I think I’ll stick with the spinny disks o’rust for my TrueNAS system for the time being, as I consider it “slow storage”. That’s great for backups and media services.

As for my desktops, they are 100% NVMes, but the drive sizes are much smaller. It works for me.

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Just wondering if anyone has tried WD DC HC550 SATA

  • Especially 18TB model and how much is the noise difference between WD Red Pro 16/18TB.
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SATA SSDs will die even before SATA SSDs, so this “last standing opportunity” price.
M.2 NVMe means paying through the nose for cramming as many QLC chips as possble on both sides of a tiny form factor which was designed for laptops.
Look into refurbished enterprise U.2/U.3 drives: Here is the future of flash storage. (With EDSFF to follow, but we don’t quite have the homelab chassis for these.)

And how much for 18-20 TB? I’d expect less than double the 8 TB. Too slow, too small: Damned either way.