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. In these kinds of shorter burst activity workloads, one can see how SMR may be used as a substitute. I had such a great week too. Would be very unhappy if I had gotten SMR drives though. You don’t test a drive before putting it into a rebuild scenario? 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! 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. That’s terrible practice. I thought it was good in explanation, but it’s odd. So they can target “specific” markets with the SMR drives? It says look to WD for more information and WD has not, over the course of the ensuing month, provided an update. In the file copy test, the effects of the slower SMR technology starts to show itself a bit. (2) WDC WD40EFRX-68N32N0 : 4000,7 GB [2/0/0, sa1] – wd These NFL players use their star power to make a difference Weekend Movie Releases – February 5th - February 7th Migos and … I’m thinking YES!! I didn’t specifically checked for it back then because, you know, N300 series. If you round to nearest day it’s 10 days not 9. Shucking external drives (which are often SMR) is mentioned on both pages. 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 ? Even with a cache flush they’re hitting steady state because of the rebuild. How often do you force your marathon runners to run sprints just after they’ve finished the marathon? 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). Granted, this is a good article that demonstrates what happens when SMR cache is filled and disks don’t have enough idle time to recover, but I doubt this happens a lot in the real life, and your advice to avoid SMR does not follow from the data you’re obtained. 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. Great piece STH. Had no idea this was a thing but glad I googled it now. 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. 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! We are using a third party service to manage subscriptions so you can unsubscribe at any time. Robert, that video is very hard to follow. I am running a 6×2.5″ 500GB RAID10 array for a total of 3TB for my Steam library. We use ZFS heavily and many of our readers do as well. In online product catalogs keeping the same branding means that it shows as a “newer model” at many retailers. Dear Western Digital, I will probably continue to buy WD Red in the future, but I just voted with my $$$ following that story. Finally, a FreeNAS RAIDZ resilver was performed. Gladly, i checked my WD ELEMENTS drives, a NONE of the internal drives is PLAGUED by SMR! 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/. Not that I would use SMR for NAS. It takes balls to do it but know I appreciate it. You don’t need to do it with CMR drives either. WD Red = CMR, WD Pink = SMR. And it looks like WD got caught and now have a class-action law suit brewing: I didn’t specifically checked for it back then because, you know, N300 series. At the end of the youtube, it clearly shows a WD produced spec sheet that shows which drives are SMR vs CMR. I want to point out that you’re wrong about one thing. Would be interesting to test on consumer devices such as Synology or QNAP ? 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. Specifically, RAID arrays our readers use. I truly would like to know in order to make a decision. They are using smaller capacity drives with different NAS systems. The performance of the drive seemed to recover relatively quickly if given even brief periods of inactivity. They work aggressively in the background to mitigate their own limitations. As an individual drive, the WD40EFAX is performing pretty well in these benchmarks. 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. The other three drives in the array remain consistent. Very interesting, very disconcerting. Fortunately I bought WD Red 4TB drives a long time ago and they are EFRX and they were used in a RAID system. We say 9 days and we’re understating the problem, which in my mind is the more defensible position. They’re using different size drives, more drives, they’re not putting a workload and just letting it rebuild. Why keep SMR and PMR drives with the SAME capacity in the same line and HIDING this info from customers? The WD40EFAX turns in performance numbers that are significantly worse than the CMR drives. I’m thinking YES!! A great example is http://blog.robiii.nl/2020/04/wd-red-nas-drives-use-smr-and-im-not.html. As a perpetual dabbler, he is always open to new solutions for old problems. Maybe I’m in the minority here. Clearly the problem is with the label on the drive. NAS drives are always a gamble, SMR or not, you should always keep away from the cheap HDD drives and that also includes cheap SSD’s if you are trying to have a NAS that have a good performance in a Raid setup. It can be… BUT, before that happens, WD is probably using the most demanding customers / environments to TEST SMR tech so they can DEPLOY them in the bigger capacity DRIVES: 8, 10, 12, 14TB and beyond (do not currently exist). However, the WD40EFAX is not a consumer desktop-focused drive. Sometimes they put in blues or whatever because that’s all they can get. I will NEVER buy another EXTERNAL WD drive again without the warranty to check the internal drive MODEL first!!!! About 5 years ago I bought a Seagate 8TB Archive SMR disk for backing up my FreeNAS. Replacing with 1 SMR disk. To be crystal clear, I knew what SMR was, and that the drive used it. An article like this has a high likelihood of ruffling feathers, so we wanted to have as many bases covered as possible. 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). Luke, This is a a great article. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/western-digital-gets-sued-for-sneaking-smr-disks-into-its-nas-channel/, Form to join the class: WD technicians don’t have a way to query the drive and ask for the model number?? Red HDD’s performance is close to the Green HDD, power consumption is low, low noise, can be suitable for continuous working, featuring NAS ware technology, this technology offers better … This is once again largely due to the manufacturing technique of HDD becoming far more efficient, as well as SSD media becoming … The potential for confusion is still high though. yes indeed they only compare rebuilding while there is no other access. I use ZFS on it, with snapshots, so it actually stores multiple backups. In the Video Patrick says 9 days. Something we noticed is that the test that immediately followed the file copy test was a sequential CrystalDiskMark workload: As you can see, with a heavy write workload immediately preceding the CDM test, the SMR drive was notably slower. Great piece STH. Even down to external drives needing to be marked in this way. Well, i got new for you: crystaldiskinfo CAN!!! 1) For higher NAS use stay away from SMR HDD, and QLC SSD’s. First up is CMR, which stands for conventional magnetic recording. Since then, I standardized on 10 TB which are CRM. Reds aren’t cheap either, but they’ve previously been good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjzoSwR6AYA. Has anyone tested this? 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. Thanks to the public outcry, WD is now properly noting the use of SMR technology in the drives on their online store, and Amazon and Newegg have also followed suit. Will has worked in both big enterprise and small business IT since 2001. During this time, scrubs were disabled for the pool and resilvering priority was completely disabled. We did not experience this failure mode, and instead only received extremely poor performance. Will has worked in both big enterprise and small business IT since 2001. (1) WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0 : 2000,3 GB [1/0/0, sa1] – wd I will NEVER buy another EXTERNAL WD drive again without the warranty to check the internal drive MODEL first!!!! I want to point out that you’re wrong about one thing. I do get the unhappyness about not branding correctly but I cannot beleive that the results are this severe for consumer NAS especially ? Would be very unhappy if I had gotten SMR drives though. The WD Green Series of Hard Drives for Lower Power Consumption for quieter and Cooler requirements The WD Green series, once very popular, is largely overlooked these days. Learn how your comment data is processed. They were priced like new WD Red 10TB 😉. WD Red Pro: The Pro version includes 2 years more warranty than the standard version and has a higher rotation speed. Next, we are going to get to our test results before getting to our final words. Top Hardware Components for FreeNAS NAS Servers, Top Hardware Components for pfSense Appliances, Top Hardware Components for napp-it and Solarish NAS Servers, Top Picks for Windows Server 2016 Essentials Hardware, The DIY WordPress Hosting Server Hardware Guide, RAID Reliability Calculator | Simple MTTDL Model, Shingled Magnetic Recording Technologies for Large-Capacity Hard Disk Drives, STH Q2 2020 Update A Letter from the Editor, Microchip NVMe-SAS-4-SATA SmartROC 3200 and SmartIOC 2200 Launched, Marvell NativeRAID NVMe RAID for M.2 Solutions Comes to HPE, 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, https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-hdd, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/western-digital-gets-sued-for-sneaking-smr-disks-into-its-nas-channel/, https://www.hattislaw.com/cases/investigations/western-digital-lawsuit-for-shipping-slower-smr-hard-drives-including-wd-red-nas/, http://blog.robiii.nl/2020/04/wd-red-nas-drives-use-smr-and-im-not.html, https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-red-hdd/data-sheet-western-digital-wd-red-hdd-2879-800002.pdf, https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr-disks-arent-great-but-theyre-not-garbage/2/. 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’m really frustrated. After that, some more targeted tests were run, pitting the WD40EFAX against three other CMR 4TB drives in a standard ZFS RAIDZ operation: rebuilding an array with a new drive after a drive has failed. Great article, thanks for the info. Using older WD Reds in a server with ZFS raid, and thinking about buying more on sale… big eye opener here. That’s why STH is a gem. This is one of the more tricky, and less obvious reliability measurements. Either is bad. It seems like a marketing TEST!!! CMR was tested in the same way so I don’t see how its a bad test. 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. I’m fine with the drive makers selling SMR drives. Many will simply purchase the newer model expecting it to be better as previous generations have been. It takes balls to do it but know I appreciate it. They go way too in-depth on the technical side, but when you’re looking at it, they did a less good experiment. I thought it was good in explanation, but it’s odd. About 5 years ago I bought a Seagate 8TB Archive SMR disk for backing up my FreeNAS. If you watch the video, it’s funny. We had two main areas of testing. 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. I’d like to say thanks to Seagate for keeping CMR IronWolf. (BTW, if you ask WD how to know the DRIVE MODEL inside an external WD enclosure, they will tell you it’s impossible!!! Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Thank you to Will for doing this testing and Patrick for making it happen. Granted, this is a good article that demonstrates what happens when SMR cache is filled and disks don’t have enough idle time to recover, but I doubt this happens a lot in the real life, and your advice to avoid SMR does not follow from the data you’re obtained. 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. Finally a reputable site has covered this. It can be… BUT, before that happens, WD is probably using the most demanding customers / environments to TEST SMR tech so they can DEPLOY them in the bigger capacity DRIVES: 8, 10, 12, 14TB and beyond (do not currently exist). This is a a great article. You didn’t address this but now I’ve got a problem. Customers MUST be informed of this new tech, even those using EXTERNAL SINGLE DRIVES ENCLOSURES!!! I say this because, WD has the same “infected SMR drives” using the well known PMR tech! Testing the WD Red 4TB SMR WD40EFAX Drive. Impossible to replace a disk in a RAID5 array, the controller would eventually fail the rebuild. In both cases, the WD Red SMR drives would not work for me personally. In read tests the SMR drive performs fairly similarly to the CMR based WD40EFRX. https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-red-hdd/data-sheet-western-digital-wd-red-hdd-2879-800002.pdf. Then I found out about this lawsuit. However, it’s a good idea that … Purpose built for multi-user NAS environments, IronWolf is perfect for teams needing to store more and work faster. You’d be surprised how often we see clients do this panic and put in new drives. They’re using different size drives, more drives, they’re not putting a workload and just letting it rebuild. At the end of the youtube, it clearly shows a WD produced spec sheet that shows which drives are SMR vs CMR. They were apologetic, but then they dropped the bombshell: All Seagate 2.5″ drives are SMR, they no longer make 2.5″ PMR drives. As a perpetual dabbler, he is always open to new solutions for old problems. Robert Dole, And upon further investigation I found out that these disks are SMR. They have a WD Red in stock so you buy it and install it without doing a day’s worth of online research. It’s about time a large highly regarded site stepped in by doing more than just covering what Chris did. We’ve found it fitting to resurrect this WD Blue, Black, Green, Red, and Purple drive naming scheme explanation. It is called shingled because the data tracks can be visualized like roofing shingles; they partially overlap each other. Get the best of STH delivered weekly to your inbox. here they compared a Rebuild with mixed drives and the results were not as sever ? Even with a new motherboard the problem persisted. Dear Western Digital, I will probably continue to buy WD Red in the future, but I just voted with my $$$ following that story. For my use, (it was the only 8TB drive on the market for a reasonable price at that time), it works well. 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. If we’d said 10 days, someone could come along and say we were exaggerating the issue. My backup window is not time constrained, I simply let it run until it’s done. here they compared a Rebuild with mixed drives and the results were not as sever ? Would be interesting to test on consumer devices such as Synology or QNAP ? I already changed motherboard once because I thought it was a motherboard issue. Well, i got new for you: crystaldiskinfo CAN!!! 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. Since my source had 4 x 4TB WD Red CMRs, using a single 8TB drive for backups was perfect. CMOSTTL this basically shows stay away from SMR even for backup in NASes. Get the best of STH delivered weekly to your inbox. I get that it’s not OK to hide what the drive actually uses, but on a Media Server/Backup level ? page https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-hdd. We are using a third party service to manage subscriptions so you can unsubscribe at any time. 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. 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. Taking into account that you regularly make backups from the backups. 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! And for SSD be aware that SSD QLC SSD drives will fall back to about 80MBps transfer rate as soon as you fill the small cache that it has built in. 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. STH articles have always had the feel of ‘real news’ to me–from the easystore article to this one, highlighting the true pros and cons. Background: AFAIK, the SMR Reds support the TRIM command. Top Hardware Components for FreeNAS NAS Servers, Top Hardware Components for pfSense Appliances, Top Hardware Components for napp-it and Solarish NAS Servers, Top Picks for Windows Server 2016 Essentials Hardware, The DIY WordPress Hosting Server Hardware Guide, RAID Reliability Calculator | Simple MTTDL Model, STH Q2 2020 Update A Letter from the Editor, Microchip NVMe-SAS-4-SATA SmartROC 3200 and SmartIOC 2200 Launched, Marvell NativeRAID NVMe RAID for M.2 Solutions Comes to HPE, 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, https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-hdd, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/western-digital-gets-sued-for-sneaking-smr-disks-into-its-nas-channel/, https://www.hattislaw.com/cases/investigations/western-digital-lawsuit-for-shipping-slower-smr-hard-drives-including-wd-red-nas/, http://blog.robiii.nl/2020/04/wd-red-nas-drives-use-smr-and-im-not.html, https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-red-hdd/data-sheet-western-digital-wd-red-hdd-2879-800002.pdf, https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr-disks-arent-great-but-theyre-not-garbage/2/. I do get the unhappyness about not branding correctly but I cannot beleive that the results are this severe for consumer NAS especially ? +1 on rep for it. At least WD is now showing which model numbers are CMR or SMR on their spec. More trolls on STH when you get to these mass audience articles. That’s for sure! Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. 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 heard beeping and took me a while to figure out what was beeping. Due to the nature of our last test, it was not performed in rapid succession with the previous two. I had such a great week too. The general population does not follow drive technology closely. Just read this bollocks: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr-disks-arent-great-but-theyre-not-garbage/2/. I don’t want a mechanical disk that overlaps tracks and has to write adjacent tracks just to write a specific track!!! 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. 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. Plus, I’d like to see some stock hardware RAID devices tested along the same lines. Thank you for the article and thank you in particular Will for the link to the WD Product brief. Guess I should be happy all mine are EFRX as well…, Someone said this is part of a RACE for BIGGER capacities. And this is VERY BAD NEWS. The differences between SMR and CMR are fairly nuanced where regular STH readers may understand, but those regular readers are the same IT professionals that keep up on the latest technology trends in the market. 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. That’s for sure! You didn’t address this but now I’ve got a problem. You’d be surprised how often we see clients do this panic and put in new drives. 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)??? Since my source had 4 x 4TB WD Red CMRs, using a single 8TB drive for backups was perfect. 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. I think you should explain how SMR works with a bunch of images or an animation. 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. So glad I got 12TB Toshibaa N300’s last year that are CMR. WD Red = CMR, WD Pink = SMR. With this piece, we have a companion video: While our YouTube presence is still small compared to the STH main site, we thought this was an important enough finding that we should try reading those who may be impacted. Many of our readers may already be familiar with the differences between SMR and CMR, but a quick refresher never hurt anyone! Also, if you trim the entire disk (and maybe wait a little), does it return to initial performance? It is strange not to at least generate some workload during a rebuild. For single drive installations, the WD40EFAX will likely function without issue. If you use WD Red CMR drives, you had class-leading performance in this test but if you bought a WD Red SMR drive, perhaps not understanding the difference, you would have another 9 days of potentially catastrophic data vulnerability. I learned this lesson a few years ago with Seagate SMR drives and a 3ware 9650se. Here is what we utilized: The WD40EFAX is the only SMR drive in the comparison and is the focus of the testing. NAS drives are always a gamble, SMR or not, you should always keep away from the cheap HDD drives and that also includes cheap SSD’s if you are trying to have a NAS that have a good performance in a Raid setup. Maybe I’m in the minority here. If you mix drives, the slower ones tend to dictate performance more times than not. Obviously this CMR cache will have a limited capacity, and with enough write operations can be exhausted. They wrote the article like someone who uses ZFS though. We say 9 days and we’re understating the problem, which in my mind is the more defensible position. We use ZFS heavily and many of our readers do as well. Compare this with the “INFECTED” SMR drive list, and you’re good to go! Does it strongly depend on the Type of RAID and Filesystem ? Thanks for testing and reporting! Was there nobody on the team who realised the consequences? Finally a reputable site has covered this. 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. 2) For backup purposes SMR HDD and QLC SSD is a good choice. We’ll talk about the best drives for each purpose (e.g. Effectively we wanted to take CPU performance out of the equation to focus on drive performance. Forum discussion: Dangit. We are also testing a common use case that many may not think of. In short, there was, and in a big way. Testing commenced immediately after the drive prep was completed. Their insight into the drive being used while doing the rebuild is great too.