Customers MUST be informed of this new tech, even those using EXTERNAL SINGLE DRIVES ENCLOSURES!!! I have many WD external drives, and i DON’T WANT any drive with SMR!!! Period! Great article as always. 🙂 Great to see some hard facts related to this after reading about it from others. Why is that? Why keep SMR and PMR drives with the SAME capacity in the same line and HIDING this info from customers? So they can target “specific” markets with the SMR drives? It seems like a marketing TEST!!! How BIG is it?

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. When it comes to data recovery one of the most common problems Western Digital WD40EFRX Hard Disk Drive experience is burnt circuit board(PCB). So if you will need to match a replacement PCB, it is important that you note the “ Board Number” of your current circuit board in addition to the hard drive’s “ Model Number“. Robert – I generally look for low-cost CMR drives, and expect that they will fail on me. While I expect the drive failures, I also look for a predictable level of performance during operation and rebuilds. In both cases, the WD Red SMR drives would not work for me personally. I will also say that a likely part of the problem here is that these are DM-SMR drives that hide the fact they are SMR from the host. SMR drive support is getting better when hosts know they are using SMR drives. Both models are relatively silent compared to WD Blue or others, but you can tell the difference between the two reds above. 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 ?To keep the comparison, use the same disk configuration of 4 x 4TB CMR disk in a RAID-5. Replacing with 1 SMR disk. 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! (EDIT -> COPY or CTRL-C). Paste it to a text editor, and voila!!! 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. This is the revision of firmware that came on both of our drives. We did not experience this failure mode, and instead only received extremely poor performance. Perhaps that was because we were testing the use of the drive as a replacement rather than building an entire array of SMR drives. In either case, we suggest not using them.

Granted! To get the more accurate results I could swap the drivers slots and perform the comparison again. However, given that before I already had 4x 68WT0N0 drivers located on the same exact slots and the HDD temperature was quite high even then, I can conclude that the temperature difference is not caused by different HDD slot, air etc.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. Had no idea this was a thing but glad I googled it now. The only positive here is that the resilver did finish, and encountered no errors along the way, but the performance operating in the RAIDZ array was completely unacceptable. That 9 day and almost 14-hour rebuild means that using the WD Red 4TB SMR drive inadvertently in an array would lead to your data being vulnerable for around 9 days longer than the WD Red 4TB CMR drive or Seagate IronWolf. 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. 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. First up is the file copy test. Just a reminder, this test was performed as immediately as possible after completing the drive preparation process. File Copy Test

Would be worthwhile to at least update the following articles with a warning to avoid SMR HDDs when using ZFS:The RAID rebuild problem you refer to is a peculiarity of ZFS. It does not occur in Hardware Based RAID and it does not occur in Windows RAID or Storage Spaces. It does not occur in other Software Defined Storage solutions. I knew of the WD SMR scandal. Fortunately, I have four of the WD40EFRZ CMR models, so breathed a sigh of relief. However, WD have gotten off incredibly lightly here. They marketed their Red range as NAS drives, all of them, not just those they knew were CMR. That’s completely unacceptable and the fact they weren’t forced to change those SMR Red’s to Blue or Blue Plus or something, is outrageous. You will see the family name (Giant or Apollo), number of heads (8 or 6), capacity, RPM, SATA link rate. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/western-digital-gets-sued-for-sneaking-smr-disks-into-its-nas-channel/ Something we noticed is that the test that immediately followed the file copy test was a sequential CrystalDiskMark workload: SMR CrystalDiskMark