Late last week Western Digital in response to the exposure of undocumented use of Shingled Magnetic Media Recording (SMR) technology in 2TB and 6TB WD Red NAS drives. Toshiba and Seagate Blocks & Files that some of their drives also use SMR technology undocumented. I think it's time for PC vendors to put things in order.
The SMR method of tiled magnetic recording makes it possible to increase the storage capacity by 15β20%. However, the technology has significant drawbacks, the key of which is the reduction in the speed of data rewriting, which can be very critical when used in a PC.
Therefore, desktop and laptop manufacturers must clearly state in technical documentation and marketing materials that their systems use drives with SMR technology. This will prevent some WD Red NAS drives from being used in consumer PCs.
A senior industry source, who asked to remain anonymous, told Blocks & Files: βIt's really not surprising that WD and Seagate have been offering OEMs SMR desktop hard drivesβthey're cheaper by volume, after all. And, unfortunately, it's not surprising that desktop manufacturers like Dell and HP used them in their machines without informing their customers and end users (and/or business PC buyers, usually purchasing agents)β¦ I think the problem is already spreading throughout the supply chain, and not just for hard drive manufacturers.β
WD uses SMR in its 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, and 6TB Red series drives, and regular CMR recording in its 8TB, 10, 12, and 14TB drives in the same family. That is, we are talking about the division of one family of products into two parts, each of which uses different technologies for writing to disk. Moreover, SMR is used to further reduce the cost of more affordable solutions.
WD said in a statement that when testing WD Red drives, they found no problems with RAID reconstruction due to SMR technology. However, users of the Reddit, Synology and smartmontools forums have found problems: for example, with the ZFS RAID and FreeNAS extensions.
Alan Brown, network manager at UCL, who originally reported the problem with SMR, said: βThese drives are not suitable for this purpose (use in RAID reconstruction). Because in this particular case, they cause a relatively provable and repeatable problem that leads to serious errors. The SMR drives sold for NAS and RAID have such horrendous and variable bandwidth that they are simply unusable.
Even people using Seagate drives with SMR report occasional 10-second pauses in recordings, and those who initially had reasonable performance with SMR drive arrays confirmed that the backup drive reconstruction process was a serious problem that they did not accept. into account until they try to put it into practice.
Source: 3dnews.ru