As we mentioned earlier, hard drive machines using SMR technology have a large amount of data on each plate because the tracks are written horizontally to each other, which allows the builder save production costs. However, this results in poor performance and when used in RAID programs they give rise to equilibrium problems when trying to make a return, resulting in data loss.
What technology does each WD hard drive use?
This is a list as published by the company:
| Status | The ability | WD Red | WD Red Pro | WD Blue | WD Black | WD Purple |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.5 " | 1TB or less | CMR | CMR | CMR | CMR | CMR |
| 3.5 " | 2TB – 6TB | SMR | CMR | SMR / CMR | CMR | CMR |
| 3.5 " | 8TB or higher | CMR | CMR | – | – | CMR |
| 2,5 " | 500GB or less | – | – | CMR | CMR | – |
| 2,5 " | 1TB | CMR | – | SMR | SMR | – |
| 2,5 " | 2TB | – | – | SMR | – | – |
So, we now know that not only are WD Red drivers with SMR technology, but also that there are many WD Blue and 2.5 TB 1TB WD Black drivers too.
If you have an SMR disk you should let it "rest"
As WD posted on its blog, its WD Red hard drives are for home users and SMBs, especially NAS with 1 to 8 bays, and deliver the best performance that has been tested and compiled by many NAS manufacturers. These disks (either SMRs or CMRs) are configured workloads up to 180TB per year and they do so in their professional journals.
The fact is that because of how SMR technology works, data is written to the free disk sectors and later, when the disk is at rest, DMSMR is dedicated to putting that data in its place. According to the manufacturer, if we overload the disk and do not give DMSMR time to do its work, this is where performance dips occur, but they say this is a user error because they will be using the disk above their description.
In other words, if at some point you insert a hard disk a lot of load and you see that its performance decreases it's your fault because you don't use it the way it was made. Of course, they don't say that if the user knew if the disk was originally CMR or SMR You probably didn't buy that model properly to avoid these problems.
And, as we mentioned earlier, the manufacturer had the discacity to say that if we don't want to have these problems we have to buy very expensive, expensive equipment. What we need to hear, shouldn't these discs be made for NASs?
WD doesn't say anything about SMR disk problems in RAID
How much of this workload can overload the disks? For example, when a disk explodes in a RAID environment you have to restart it, because when the restore is full there will be more active disks. And more precisely this is one of the problems that SMR disks offer, they when trying to retrieve RAID they provide a data equalization error and in many cases restoration fails, it happens data loss.
WD Reds must be NAS hard drives, and this is stated by the manufacturer. And really, who has NAS with disk stack and doesn't have RAID? Probably not. But WD has not mentioned this in its post, although it sees the same as it removed the news of the alleged use of "misuse" and urged them to buy the last discs, and we weren't surprised.
In short: WD deceived users selling SMR discs is slow and offers problems without warning, and make a lot of profit with it. Once they are found they have published a complete list when pressed, but claim that the discs are somehow designed and that it is the user's fault when they present problems because they are not properly used. And finally, I urge users (already) to buy better and more expensive records.
For all these reasons, at this time only recommend not buying a strong WD car to the extent that the company is not responsible for its own actions and actions that favor users and not their intentions.
