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List of known SMR drives

Yorick

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Nov 4, 2018
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If this had been planned properly

You mean before some bonus-hungry manager snuck SMR drives into a NAS lineup? Barn, still empty; horse, long gone.

This rebranding is damage control. A band-aid on a self-inflicted wound. Definitely not a well thought-out go to market strategy by any stretch of the imagination.

And I don’t care very much. All I care about is that branding exists that allows a clear “don’t touch” vs “yeah will work” distinction, and we got this now.

Which doesn’t change the fact WD should never have ended up here, but short of time travel, I don’t know they can fix it. It’ll take years to rebuild trust with those who got bit, and that trust may never be rebuilt.

Seagate and Toshiba, should anyone in management there be tempted, now know very clearly what not to do.
 

HoneyBadger

actually does care
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iXsystems
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No contention. Just that that horse has left the barn. Red had a good rep, it doesn’t any more. The Red brand is damaged, and WD chose to “embrace the suck” and make Red all SMR.

I’m not going to get hung up on branding. All I am saying is that the choice is now clear, where it wasn’t before.

Red: Sucks
Red+: The “old Red”, doesn’t suck

I have no emotional attachment to what the Red brand used to stand for. It doesn’t stand for that, any more, and WD have only themselves to blame for that.

Agreed on confetti in the Seagate offices. What a gift from a competitor.

This all would have been resolved had they just introduced the DM-SMR under a different branding and color.

I'd like to suggest "WD Brown" - for the obvious reason.
 

Yorick

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Ericloewe

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Makes sense. You need to grab yourself a coffee while waiting for the disks.
 

dak180

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Nov 22, 2017
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per servethehome and other outlets, WD announced that they’re going to segment their red line into three different families,
  • Red (DMSMR)
  • Red+ (CMR @ 5900 RPM?), and
  • RedPro (CMR @ 7,200 RPM)

Does anyone here know if there are any drives besides Red+ that are suitable for NAS and 5400/5900 RPM?

The major reason I have preferred the red line in the past over others is that it ran cooler and used less power for a speed difference that in zfs is mostly meaningless.
 

Yorick

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Does anyone here know if there are any drives besides Red+ that are suitable for NAS and 5400/5900 RPM?

Shucked WDs at 8TB and above. I got HGST He8 down-spun to 5400rpm.

Both Toshiba and Seagate go for 7200 rpm on their NAS drives.
 

subhuman

Contributor
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Nov 21, 2019
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Yorick said:
Yup they are a good alternative. TLER and vibration firmware, "up to 8 drives" same as Red. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Understanding-the-WD-Rainbow-674/
Sorry, responding to the old post from ~3 mos ago. Puget's info is a little outdated. "Up to 8 drives" was the spec for 1-2TB Purples. 3TB+ are listed at 8+ bays, same as Red Pros, and 360TB/yr Annual Workload, also the same as Red Pros.
The downside for you, Yorick, is that 8TB+ are 7200 RPM. I don't have any 7200RPM models, so I can't comment on how much or little heat they may generate. However, it's probably safe to speculate that the two models listed with idle power around 8w would run hotter than the models listed with idle power in the 5-6w range.
 

Yorick

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It's not upcoming, it's been in FreeNAS for a while now.

I was wondering about that, and just found this from Matt Ahrens, in response to how to handle SMR drives:

"That's right. You want "actually sequential" rebuild, which is in code review (caveat: it works only for mirrors+DRAID, not RAIDZ): https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/10349. (Perhaps for SMR we additionally want to write zeros to unallocated regions, so that we don't leave any unwritten sectors?)"


From that PR:

"The sequential reconstruction feature adds a more traditional RAID rebuild mechanism to ZFS. Specifically, it allows for mirror vdevs to be rebuilt in LBA order. Depending on the pools average block size, overall fragmentation, and the performance characteristics of the devices (SMR) sequential reconstruction can restore redundancy in less time than a traditional healing resilver. However, it cannot verify block checksums as part of the rebuild. Therefore a scrub is automatically started when the last active sequential resilver completes."

I'm always amazed at what the OpenZFS devs come up with.
 

Yorick

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Thanks, I've added those.
 

dak180

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Does anyone here know if there are any drives besides Red+ that are suitable for NAS and 5400/5900 RPM?

Both Toshiba and Seagate go for 7200 rpm on their NAS drives.
I rather thought that they were the only manufacture doing that. ☹
 

Constantin

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May 19, 2017
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I'd take a look at @farmerpling2 excellent list of hard drives. Set RPM aside for a moment and sort among suitable drives for low power consumption. For example, I wasn't going to consider 2.5" mechanisms as I wanted 8 or 10TB drives to minimize drive count. Chances are, a helium drive will be your friend. I'd also think about your pool config vs. the backup systems - is there a way to consolidate your holdings around one drive capacity so you have to carry fewer spares?

I use He10's for my NAS and while the 7,200 RPM is unlikely to make a significant data transfer difference, I do trust the old HGST drives more than comparable stuff from Seagate. Toshiba also seems like a good bet. But then again, I like to live dangerously, having bought used drives that were on average about 2 years old when I got them. Besides some DOAs the rest have performed fine and I have several burnt-in cold spares handy. For my backup arrays, I shucked lower-cost drives from WD elements / easystore units (they're all helium units also).

My spares are all the higher-RPM HGSTs He10's, however. That way, they're interchangeable between backup and primary NAS.
 
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NasKar

Guru
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Jan 8, 2016
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Just shucked WD elements 12 TB drives. Some are WD120EMAZ or others are WD120EMFZ. Is there a way to determine if they are SMR or CMR? Not sure what the difference is. The WD120EMAZ are in the Ultrastar family and the other is Red family. All with white label.
 

Yorick

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Nov 4, 2018
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These are all CMR. There are no known 12TB SMR drives in the WD portfolio.
 

Constantin

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These are all CMR. There are no known 12TB SMR drives in the WD portfolio.
I'd add "as far we we know".

Yes, at least WD changed the part number / SKU when they started substituting SMR drives in place of CMR drives in the Red line, but I wouldn't trust them much at this point. Maybe WD management has learned that its customers aren't as dopey as they had hoped, but I wouldn't count on them not to try again in the future... especially if removing a platter and two read/write arms is the difference between making the personal bonus threshold or not.

FWIW, I stocked up on more 10TB helium drives as spares than I would normally carry for that reason. I want to stick to known-good stuff vs. taking a chance with new stock whose provenance / innards may not be what I expected.
 

Z300M

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I'd add "as far we we know".

Yes, at least WD changed the part number / SKU when they started substituting SMR drives in place of CMR drives in the Red line, but I wouldn't trust them much at this point. Maybe WD management has learned that its customers aren't as dopey as they had hoped, but I wouldn't count on them not to try again in the future... especially if removing a platter and two read/write arms is the difference between making the personal bonus threshold or not.

FWIW, I stocked up on more 10TB helium drives as spares than I would normally carry for that reason. I want to stick to known-good stuff vs. taking a chance with new stock whose provenance / innards may not be what I expected.
Are your "spare" drives "hot spares"? If not, by the time you come to use them you may find that they are faulty and that the warranty has expired. And couldn't this happen even if you "burn them in" and then put them away on a shelf ready for use?
 

Constantin

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Cold spares, set aside after qualifying them with a burn-in.
  • By no means risk-free but arguably less risky than relying on the supply-chain to having a working drive in stock when you need it. (Remember the floods in Thailand and the impact that had on the HDD industry?)
  • I've had a few DOAs delivered here which is why I burn-in all drives.
  • I prefer to limit time pool spends in degraded mode before resilvering.
  • Specific drives (ex: helium 8TB) may not be offered in the future.
  • Quality profiles of drives / product families can change over time (Ex. long-term impact of WD ownership on HGST)
  • Some vendors offer longer-than-OEM warranties but replacement availability will always be limited by market supply.
All comes down to your aversion to risk. My use of a Z3 plus multiple cold spares is a reflection of that. My pool layout and spares selection is based on being able to share the same drives in my backups, hence reducing the number of spares needed.
 
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Last edited:
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Given the datasheet for those two Seagate drives showing areal density of ~1200Gb (1TB platters in 2.5") I'm going to assume SMR for those two Skyhawk drives as well.
Thanks. I'll assume the site has it incorrectly recorded.
 
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