Compatibility: Unlike desktop drives, these drives are tested for compatibility and optimum performance. The disappointing thing is that I've always been a loyal WD customer at home and at work and this debacle is putting me right out. Normally their stuff has been really good. (Or, at least "not-great-but-cheap and you knew that when you bought it" in the case of Green) Western Digital partners with a wide range of NAS system vendors for extensive testing to ensure compatibility with most NAS enclosures. In read tests the SMR drive performs fairly similarly to the CMR based WD40EFRX. HDTune Write Benchmark We are aware of iXsystems stance on WD Red SMR drives, detailed in an article here. The short version is that they advise against use of these drives. That blog was posted after we had already embarked upon this adventure. It says look to WD for more information and WD has not, over the course of the ensuing month, provided an update. 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.

Desktop hard drives are designed for optimum performance and reliability in a desktop personal computer. Although they are an affordable alternative to enterprise-class drives, desktop drives have a higher level of risk for potential data loss and failure in an always-on RAID configured NAS system. Specific issues that you may experience using desktop drives in a NAS or RAID environment include: Then I found out about this lawsuit. And upon further investigation I found out that these disks are SMR. I filed a support request with Seagate. I have heard bad things about these EFAX drives but surely they are not so bad that 6 identical drives would all be unusable? So, how much should I worry about these errors? These new drives seem to be an upgraded version of their older CMR drives that used the same recording technology. When they silently replaced CMR with SMR drives they had more cache available. Now they have matched the cache size with their SMR drives. In a RAID situation, you will not benefit from this cache since all data is written randomly across many drives. But it is interesting that their speed has been increased from around 150 to 170 MB/s. If you have older drives that are slower you will not benefit from this. But if you have a new NAS then certainly choosing these faster drives would theoretically improve NAS speeds. In the existing setup, the speed will be as fast as the slowest link in the chain. If you connect via 1GbE LAN then you will not notice a speed difference anyway. Es importante elegir un disco especialmente diseñado para sistemas NAS optimizados para RAID a fin de garantizar un rendimiento óptimo y conservar sus datos valiosos. Cuando elija un disco duro para su NAS, tenga en cuenta los siguientes aspectos:

WD Red SMR v. CMR Part II: The Not So Good

In our average latency segment with a load of 16T/16Q, the WD Red 4TB again scored in the middle of the comparables. In a Network Attached Storage device, a desktop hard drive is not designed for NAS environments. Do right by your NAS and choose the drive with an array of features to preserve your data and maintain optimum performance. Take the following into consideration when choosing a hard drive for your NAS:

The File Server profile puts the drives through a varying workload with a thread and queue count that scales from 2T/2Q up to 16T/16Q. The WD Red again exhibits strong performance with two threads and a deep queue, but otherwise remains in the median position. The standard deviation chart further highlights the strong performance at a thread count of two and queue of sixteen. Otherwise, the Red 4TB does not stand out among the comparables but does consistently outperform the Seagate NAS 4TB and the Red 3TB.

With all the recent controversy regarding WD, Toshiba, and Seagate slipping SMR drives into retail channels and failing to disclose the use of their slower technology, we thought it would be interesting to dive into the actual impact of using a SMR drive. We can hypothesize that there is a negative impact, but it is better to show it. 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. Accompanying Video Our next test shifts focus from a pure 4K random read or write scenario to a mixed 8K 70/30 workload. We show how performance scales in this setting from 2T/2Q up to 16T/16Q. When it came down to the drive that offered the best 8K 70/30 throughput, all drives performed very close when configured in RAID5 in our Synology NAS. Comparing first and second generation Red HDDs, the 4TB model did offer some gains over the 3TB version depending on the workload intensity, although those gains did narrow in a few spots. Slotting in between the 3TB and 4TB Red models, the 1TB 2.5″ version proved to be quite capable. As you can see, with a heavy write workload immediately preceding the CDM test, the SMR drive was notably slower. In some ways, this is like timing a runner’s sprint time after running a marathon. 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. Still, this is a good indicator of the drive working through its internal data management processes and impacting performance. 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.