4tb WD reds/whites in external enclosures

[napalm1984]

Found this on Amazon for those of us not with huge budgets

Robot Check

Check the reviews people are posting pics of them cracked open

 

[Yorick]

You should expect these to be re-badged WDxxEFAX or equivalent Blue (DM-SMR), up to the 6TB enclosures. 8TB and up are safe, for now.

Shucking has been a thing for a long while, it's a great way to get affordable drives. Just watch out for DM-SMR, or choose to go DM-SMR, rather than "ending up with one".

 

[Constantin]

I'd also consider that Backblaze is purposefully staying away from SMR drives due to the issues they present in a NAS environment. Device-managed SMR is the worst of all worlds in a NAS use case.

 

[Yorick]

due to the issues they present in a NAS environment

Thanks for linking to that, that’s interesting! Note he speaks of HM-SMR, and the additional engineering to make that work - code and flash cache layer. For their use case, the 10 to 15% cost advantage is erased by that added complexity, so they don’t go there.

Agreed that DM-SMR is the worst possible SMR type for a NAS. I’m not aware of anything off the shelf that talks to HA-SMR or HM-SMR, though. Which means the shorthand of “your default stance should be “no SMR”” is entirely reasonable.